While naysayers have been at their usual pessimistic best, praise for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sanitation programme and other social welfare measures are coming from people who do not waste their words and who are under no obligation to dish out praise, except when it is due. Microsoft founder and one of the world’s leading philanthropists, Bill Gates, explained the logic for deciding to award Primr Minister Modi at the Goalkeepers Global Goals Awards on September 24 and 25. The award was influenced by the fact that the Modi government has worked to provide sanitation to at least 500 million people. Gates said that sanitation was chosen because, in a lot of countries, it’s not even discussed. 

COMMERCIAL BREAK
SCROLL TO CONTINUE READING

India, over the last five years, has allocated resources and talked about the need to clean up. “India is an exemplar on this and so it’s very appropriate to have an award for something that is not as visible as vaccine coverage,” he told an Indian newspaper. According to the Economic Survey, 2018-19, 30 states and Union territories had 100% coverage of household toilets, as of June 2019. Nearly 90% of all Swacch Bharat Mission (SBM) toilets have been geo-tagged, the Survey claimed. K V Subramanian, the chief economic adviser to the Union government, said that more than 9.5 crore toilets have been constructed since October 2014. Sanitation isn’t the only area that’s impressive. 

India’s “innovative and thoughtful” use of digital technology to make people’s lives better and the financial freedom and health benefits of the cooking gas-subsidy reforms for women under the Ujjwala Yojana are showcased in Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual Goalkeepers Examining Inequality 2019 report released recently. The Foundation tracks global progress in meeting the United Nation’s Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs) by 2030. It also closely tracked financial services, where it found India making good progress on reforms in money transactions. Women’s access has gone up from 40% to over 70%, it said. India also comes in for high praise in the usage of new vaccines, that has led to the reduction of childhood deaths. Predictably, the decision has not gone too well with the ubiquitous human rights lobby, peeved over developments in Jammu & Kashmir. 

Well, it is getting its lines mixed up: while Kashmir is an issue, where is its point of conflict with the millions of poor people who have benefited through social reforms like sanitation and health care? The announcement of the award, welcomed in most quarters in India, has prompted the delivery of a petition with around 1,00,000 signatures at the Gates Foundation’s Seattle headquarters, an op-ed in the Washington Post, and two actors pulling out from the event in New York next week. To mix up subjects like an award for good work done with a complex situation in a part of the country is to put the cart before the horse. The human rights lobby should have known better, but they obviously have not.