In villages where the number of households as per the baseline survey is less than the actual households, the toilet building exercise poses an allocation challenge: Who gets the limited number of toilets?
An RTI application has found the scheme’s publicity budget is directed at TV and print ads.
Only one out of eight ODF verified villages in three states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh was ODF while a survey by the Centre for Policy Research found that only one out of 8 verified ODF gram panchayats in Udaipur was actually ODF.
Ideally, we should have stronger monitoring and verifications on a regular basis. We wouldn’t need to keep having costly one-time mapping exercises as the mapping can be done by GPS regularly and then verified by the block sanitation coordinators.
In this post, Srivastav and Hathi contend that while the recently released National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey data seem to show that open defecation is being eliminated from rural India, this conclusion is unfortunately premature.
Swachh Bharat rural has at least twice taken data off its dashboard, including data related to release & spending of funds, conversion of insanitary toilets which foster manual scavenging, and several details of toilet construction.
With a little more than a year to go for Swachh Bharat Mission’s deadline of open-defecation-free India, patchy access to toilets, incomplete toilet construction and rampant open defecation among households with a toilet were some findings of a new study in gram panchayats (village councils) declared open defecation-free (ODF) in Rajasthan.
There are significant differences in the number of manual scavengers identified by the states and those identified in the Social Economic Caste Census (SECC) 2011
While budgetary allocation has been hiked in the last two years, it’s still not nearly enough for the government to meet its 2019 goal.
The challenge will be in ensuring that open defecation-free villages and cities are truly ODF, but more crucially that they remain so.
Swachh Bharat Mission is racing towards its target of achieving an Open Defecation Free India by 2019, constructing more than 2,000 toilets every hour; but will the gains from such increased coverage be sustainable?
