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High time to come clean

As the deadline for an ambitious government project is extended, the hope for basic sanitation in rural areas remains a distant dream

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“Sanitation is more important than independence,” said Mahatma Gandhi in 1947. However, 64 years later, India is yet to ensure that basic sanitation facilities reach all its citizens.

Worse, the wait just got longer with the government citing shortage of water as key impediment in sanitation for all.
In 1999, the government launched the ambitious Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) as a part of reform principles when Central Rural Sanitation Programme was restructured to make it demand-driven and people-centered. TSC was launched to ensure sanitation facilities in rural areas with broader goal to eradicate the practice of open defecation. However, the target for the campaign to achieve 100 percent rural sanitation coverage by 2012 has now been revised to 2017.

According to a 2010 WHO-UNICEF report, an estimated 1.1 billion people across the world defecate in the open, while 638 million do so in India. The report also pointed out that seven out of ten people in the world without improved sanitation facilities lived in rural areas. The figures released by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation in India in July this year shows that 27.19 per cent of rural households do not have proper access to sanitation facilities in India.

Admitting to the target deficit in the campaign, JS Mathur, joint secretary sanitation, ministry of drinking water and sanitation said, “The biggest challenge is availability of water which acts as a hindrance in sanitation work. Our government is to establish means to overcome this crisis.”

A state-wise assessment of the scheme for the rural belt shows Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand as living in abject sanitation conditions. For Bihar, the figure of rural households denied sanitation was as high as 61% J&K at 56.77% and Jharkhand at 54.26% respectively followed closely. Only Kerala, Sikkim and Tripura have achieved 100% sanitation coverage.
Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International, said, “There is a vast cultural gap in these areas. Moreover, proper awareness regarding health and hygiene is absent, too.”

Indira Khurana, director policy and partnership at Water Aid, an international NGO working in the areas of health and hygiene, however, believes that these states perform poorly because the state governments don’t implement the central government policies.

Elaborating the government’s agenda to tackle the situation, Mathur said, “Our main target is to construct toilets for the Below Poverty Line (BPL) households and for those who do not have economic surplus to construct toilets.”  The government proposes to form a Village Water Sanitation Committee which will have representatives from the local people and members of the panchayat. Emphasis would be on women members to handle issues pertaining to women health and hygiene.

Seeking local NGO units to work along with the village administration, Pathak argued that the sanitation work should be linked with employment opportunitie.

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