New Delhi, January 22: The Narendra Modi government is confident of achieving the target of making the entire country open-defecation free much before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. According to top government functionaries, every household in India will get a proper toilet.
On the one hand, Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri has said his ministry will hit the target a year before the October 2019 deadline and on the other, the sanitation ministry is confident of meeting the target by December 2018. According to a report in the Times of India, the target of building toilets in rural areas is 11 times higher as compared to cities and towns.
But Puri rightly pointed out that changing people’s behaviour remains a challenge. The ministry is already facing a daunting task to manage the huge quantum of daily garbage generated across urban areas.
In rural areas, the challenge is to make the facility available to people. “We have taken up both building toilets and behaviour change simultaneously in villages by involving people, motivators, local champions and village leaders. You can’t expect people to use toilets unless they have one. We are well on track,” said a senior official of the drinking water and sanitation ministry.
Till October 2014 when the Swachh Bharat Mission was launched, rural India had achieved only 39 per cent sanitation coverage, the official said. “Over 5.9 crore toilets have been built and nearly 30 crore rural Indians have stopped defecating in the open since the launch of the mission. 290 districts in seven states of Sikkim, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Gujarat and Arunachal Pradesh have become open defecation free. We are expecting another 8-10 states to become open-defecation free by March, taking the total to about 18-20. We expect 400 districts to be open-defecation free by March,” the official said.
As per the government estimates, the largescale construction of toilets has pushed economic activities and job generation. About 1.44 billion man hours were logged in for the construction of 60 million toilets in the last three-and-a-half years. A financial gain of nearly 4,400 crore for masons and labourers has been registered since then.