Covid setback for Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin; 3/4th funds unutilised

In the Budget, the finance minister announced that the government would allocate Rs 7,192 crore this financial year towards the Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin (SBM-G) — 28 per cent less than the previous three years. Last year, Rs 9,994.1 crore was allocated to the rural programme.

A Business Standard analysis shows that fund utilisation for the programme, too, has fallen by three-fourths in the last two years. In 2019-20, the government was able to utilise 82.5 per cent of the allocated funds, but data from a Parliamentary Standing Committee report shows that in 2021-22, the ministry could utilise just 21 per cent of the funds until January.

Last year, the utilisation stood at 49.5 per cent compared to the Budget Estimates.

The utilisation had declined even before the pandemic. Until SBM-G was in its initial phase, utilisation exceeded Budget Estimates for three consecutive years, from 2015-16 till 2018-19. But in 2018-19, as it neared its goal of making villages open defecation-free (ODF), it could only utilise 84.3 per cent of the Budget Estimate (see chart 1).

In February 2020, as all villages were declared ODF, the government lau­nched the mission’s sec­ond phase, which entailed building solid (SWM) and liquid waste management (LWM) systems.

The government still has three years (till 2024-25) to provide all villages with an SWM and an LWM system, but progress has been slow. Only 10.1 per cent of the villages across India have a solid waste management system and barely 6.1 per cent have a liquid waste management system. The number of villages with SWM and LWM systems is just 5 per cent (see chart 2).

Further analysis shows that except for the Andaman and Nicobar Islan­ds, none of the states/Union Territories has been able to install SWM and LWM systems in all the villages. The SWM coverage was also high for Telan­gana (99.8 per cent) and Tamil Nadu (97.2 per cent). Larger states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan had less than 5 per cent coverage. And 15 of the 34 states/UTs represented on the SBM-G dashboard had over 10 per cent SWM coverage.

The situation was much worse in the case of LWM systems. Besides the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, none of the states or UTs had covered even half their villages with an LWM system. And only 10 of 34 states and UTs had over 10 per cent of villages covered with an LWM system (see chart 3).

The progress was much slower when it came to both LWM and SWM systems being installed. Of the over 600,000 villages, 29,874 had both LWM and SWM systems — with just six states and UTs accounting for 73 per cent of the overall coverage.