Clean it up

HEALTH: After a successful sanitation drive, UNICEF is preparing to address the issue of water quality.

The United Nation's drive to meet its Millennium Development Goals in India is finally beginning to take shape in the area of water sanitation and hygiene.

The Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), a joint effort of UNICEF and the Department of Drinking Water Supply has marked widespread success and is now preparing to go one step further to address another issue "" water quality through the Water Quality Problems Programme.

In the year 2005, South Asia had 950 million people who had no access to toilets, of which rural India alone had 700 million people. With 2.6 billion people the world over living in similar conditions, this means that one in every four of these people are currently living in India.

With such staggering figures, it is no surprise that the government has increased its budget for the TSC from Rs 165 crore in 2003-04 to Rs 800 crore in 2006-07.

In fact, the total budget for the water and sanitation programmes in rural areas has been increased from Rs 2,400 crore at the beginning of the tenth five year plan to Rs 6,000 crore in the last year of the plan.

Lizette Burgers, chief, water and environmental sanitation section, UNICEF says, "Along with the Indian government, we have tried to take a different approach to the campaign. Instead of supplying facilities, we are first creating a demand for these facilities through awareness campaigns."

Interestingly, the government is not solely relying on its demand creating abilities to make the campaign a success. An incentive scheme has been launched "" the Nirmal Gram Puraskar, a clean village award that is given by the President of India.

Figures prove that the incentive scheme is successfully encouraging villagers in places like Kancheepuram and Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, Satara in Maharashtra and others in West Bengal to make their villages "open defecation free".

The number of villages contesting for the puraskar have been increasing at an amazing rate. While there were merely 40 recipients in 2005, the year 2006 saw 770 villages receiving it and the number is expected to reach an astonishing 8,000 in 2007. This year, UNICEF will go back to the villages that received the award to assess the sustenance of the campaign.

The campaign's success in India has drawn a lot of attention from countries that are suffering at the hands of poor sanitation and lack of water, wanting to visit India and study the model that has been implemented here.

UNICEF, thus, organised a 11-day study tour for 35 delegates from Pakistan, China, Sudan, Iraq, Eritrea, Nepal and Burkina Faso. Matthew Binyiri from Eritrea felt that the sanitation programme in India is a lot more intensive than the one in Eritrea.

However, he added that a strategy should be developed that would enable the villagers to look after themselves without receiving support from UNICEF or the government, as they are now.

For Tahire Yasmin, a Pakistan local government delegate, who visited Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the visit helped her understand sanitation and waste management techniques that she would like to emulate in the communities and schools in Pakistan.