WB to extend $1.5b support to Swachh Bharat Mission

NEW DELHI: The Cabinet on Wednesday approved $1.5 billion (about Rs 9,000 crore) World Bank support for the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) in rural areas.

“The project basically provides for incentivising states on the basis of their performance in the existing SBM-Gramin. Incentivisation of states was approved by the Cabinet while approving the SBM-Gramin on September 24, 2014,” Minister of Communications and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad said after the cabinet meeting here.

The current approval provides for the mechanism of such incentivisation through World Bank credit, he said, adding that under the approved project, the performance of the states will be gauged through certain performance indicators, called the DisbursementLinked Indicators (DLIs).

The states will pass on a substantial portion of more than 95 per cent of the Performance Incentive Grant Funds received from the MOWS, to the appropriate implementing levels of districts, Blocks, GPs etc, he said. The enduse of the incentive grants will be limited to activities pertaining to the sanitation sector, he added.

“The project will accelerate efforts to achieve sustained outcomes in sanitation by 2019. The incentive framework introduced through the project will reorient efforts of states towards the SBM(G) ‘ outcomes’ such as reduction in open defecation, sustainable achievement of open defecation-free (ODF) villages and improvement in solid and liquid waste management (SLWM),” Prasad said.