Note4Students

Swachh bharat mission is the one of the pet project of the Prime minister. It is important to trace the development made by the project.

Introduction

1. Swachh Bharat is a campaign by the Government of India to keep the streets, roads and infrastructure of the country’s 4,041 statutory cities and towns and its rural areas clean.
2. The mission is bifurcated into sub-missions as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Gramin), under Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Urban), under Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. It includes ambassadors and activities such as a run, national real-time monitoring and updates from NGOs.

 

Objectives Of Swachh Bharat Mission

1. Elimination of open defecation
2. Eradication of manual scavenging
3. Modern and Scientific Municipal Solid Waste Management
4. To effect behavioural change regarding healthy sanitation practices
5. Generate awareness about sanitation and its linkage with public health
6. Capacity Augmentation for Urban Local Bodies (ULB)
7. To create an enabling environment for private sector participation in Capex (capital expenditure) and Opex (operation and maintenance)

Fact and figures

1. AS OF 2011, ACCORDING TO INDIA’S LATEST CENSUS,1 percent of the country’s 246.7 million households had no latrine on their premises. Of these, a small share used public latrines, and the vast majority—half of all the households in the country—practised open defecation.
2. The United Nations, in a report on water access and sanitation in India released in 2015, said that 564 million of the country’s people still defecated in the open. They accounted for nearly half of the country’s population, and for over half of the 1.1 billion people across the world who practised open defecation. The UN estimated that 65,000 tonnes of uncovered, untreated faeces—equal to the weight of around 180 Airbus A380s—were being introduced into the environment in India every single day.
3. India’s crisis of sanitation has huge costs.
4. The UN estimates that around 117,000 of the deaths of Indian children under the age of five in 2015 were caused by diarrhoea, the incidence of which correlates closely with the quality of sanitation in an area. This means that 10 percent of all deaths under the age of five in the country are due to the disease—among the highest proportions of anywhere in the world.
5. Diarrhoea and other diseases tied to poor sanitation can have debilitating long-term effects, such as malnutrition and stunting. They also have costs in terms of decreased productivity, expenditure on treatment and premature deaths.
6. A 2015 report on the global costs of poor sanitation, co-authored by the charity WaterAid, valued the loss to India’s economy at $106 billion per year, or over 5 percent of its gross domestic product.
7. Sikkim has become the first state to be declared Open Defecation Free (ODF) this year followed by Himachal Pradesh and Kerala.
8. 6 of the top 10 clean cities of 2017 viz.,  Indore, Bhopal, Visakhapatnam, Surat, Tirupati and Vadodara have improved their sanitation rankings in 2017 over the 2016 and 2014 rankings.
9. Bottom 10 clean cities/towns  of India in 2017 are: Gonda (UP)-434, Bhusawal (Maharashtra)-433, Bagaha (Bihar)-432, Hardoi (Uttarakhand)-431, Katihar (Bihar)-430, Bahraich (UP)-429, Muktsar (Punjab)-428, Abohar (Punjab)-427, Shahjahanpur (UP)- 426 and Khurja (UP)-425.
10. Four of the bottom 10 clean cities are from UP, two each from Bihar and Punjab and one each from Uttarakhand and Maharashtra.

Analysis

Important points from cag report

1. The CAG said its audit has brought out planning level weaknesses which were critical for the success of programme.
2. More than 30 per cent of individual household latrines were defunct/non-functional for reasons like poor quality of construction, incomplete structure, non- maintenance,” it pointed out.
3. Nearly Rs 10,000 crore was spent on the rural sanitation programme by the Central government in the five years covered by audit and large scale diversions, wastages and irregularities were noted.
4. “The conceptual frame-work kept changing from supply driven to demand driven and finally to ‘saturation and convergence’ approach, yet the lessons learnt and experimentations through this long journey do not seem to have made much impact on the sanitation status in the country”.
5. CAG said unless implementation is based on realistic planning and is backed by large scale information, education and communication campaigns to bring about behavioural changes in the target population and overall governance at the grass root level improves, mere deployment of resources may not have any significant impact.

Performance analysis

1. The first step in eliminating open defecation is to make sure that people have latrines to use in the first place—
2. On this the mission is making significant headway.
3. To end manual scavenging, these latrines must be of the kinds that eliminate the handling of fresh excreta, and must be used as per design
4. .Maintaining sanitary facilities also require systems to handle the sewage they capture.
5. Manual scavenging exists in the yawning gap between the amount of excreta produced by India’s enormous population and the country’s existing capacity for processing it sanitarily.
6. If that gap is not closed, especially as the government strives to get more than half a billion people who did not previously use latrines to start using them, it will perpetuate the same old practices.

There is also another factor in getting all of India’s households and communities to use latrines, and to take collective responsibility for their upkeep.

1. Many of the current practices responsible for the abysmal state of sanitation in the country are rooted in traditional notions of purity and hygiene—often the same ones that normalise the allocation of sanitation work to the oppressed castes
2. . Transforming sanitation in India will require a large-scale change in these beliefs, yet here again the Swachh Bharatag Mission is faltering.

Funding

1. It has set up Swachh Bharat Kosh, a special fund to seek charitable contributions to the cause. Finance minister Arun Jaitley has already proposed a Swachh cess in the budget, a 2% surcharge on select services to finance and promote initiatives under the flagship programme.
2. But even the government realizes that there is a need to do much more.
3. Recently the Urban Development ministry wrote to all states requesting them to levy a user charge to support solid waste management services.
4. It has admitted that inadequate budget of municipalities can derail the Swachh Bharat initiatives in urban areas. Recently, a committee of the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog has also recommended levying a cess on telecom services, fossil fuels like coal and petrol to garner resources for the campaign. 

Social mentality

1. The problem is that rural sanitation policy does not address the real reasons why people do not like to use toilets.
2. Many people in rural India, where 90% of the country’s open defecation occurs, believe that the kinds of toilets the government promotes are impure. There is also substantial concern over what will happen when the pits of these toilets fill up, since emptying a pit is associated with manual scavenging.
3. Unfortunately, the government’s awareness campaigns are not addressing these concerns.
4. in urban areas – where 13% of the households defecate in the open – and where the remaining 1.04 crore toilets are to be built, the progress is nothing to crow about.

 

Conclusion

1. One year down the line, government statistics reveal that it has a long way to go before the goal of eliminating open defecation can be achieved. Inadequate funds, lack of capacity of municipalities and district panchayats to undertake the gargantuan task, an ineffective awareness campaign that has failed to bring about behavioural changes among the people to use latrines, are among some of the reasons that urban experts are citing as factors that could end up derailing the ambitious mission.
2. Government has set an overall target of building roughly 11.1 crore toilets by 2019 as a part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan campaign.
3. 3 crore toilets have been constructed so far. So that means about 27% of the target has been achieved. The country still has a long way to go, and the progress made so far needs to be sustained and strengthened further in the new year.

Question

Q.) What are the achievements of Swachh bharat abhiyan. Analyse in the light of CAG remarks on Swachh bharat abhiyan