 "PM Narendra Modi made a visit to Mandir Marg police station and picked up a broom to clean the garbage | Photo: PTI")
Two months ago, Ramji Gupta and his wife Manju Devi decided to discontinue patrolling and whistling every morning to warn villagers against open defecation in Jayapur village of Varanasi district.
The couple failed to convince people in the village, about 320 km southeast of Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow, to use toilets provided under the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). "Around 75 per cent people in the village use toilets. But the rest are not listening," said 30-year-old Gupta, a father of two girls and a boy. The other reason they quit was the absence of monetary incentive from the government.
Ramji has now returned to his grocery shop. The village, which was adopted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November 2014, is home to about 4,200 people. In the past two years, it got two banks, one mobile tower, a playschool, a girls' school, a bus stand, a skill-development centre, Wi-Fi connectivity at the panchayat office, solar street lamps and solar light connections in nearly 850 houses. (Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan vs Swachh Bharat)
What many of these houses don't have are toilets, to be provided under SBM.
The long ODF road
Modi launched SBM on October 2, 2014, with the aim to rid the country of the widely prevalent practice of open defecation in five years. The PM took a personal interest in the scheme. India has the dubious distinction of having 60 per cent of its vast population answering nature's call in the open - the highest for any country.
According to a World Bank report, poor sanitation has caused a loss of six per cent to gross domestic product (GDP).
Naryan Patel, the elected head of Jayapur village, said only those who have not been given toilets are still defecating in the open. "We believe the remaining 20-25 households will get latrines within a month," he said. Defunct latrines, too, had forced many people in the village to revert to open defecation. Some of the villagers said the toilets constructed for them under SBM were now defunct.
Jayapur is no aberration to the nearly 100,000 villages in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in terms of both population and size. Uttar Pradesh has only 1,950 self-declared open defecation-free (ODF) villages under SBM.
A village is declared ODF when all the households get toilets and no villager is sighted defecating in the open. The number of ODF villages is one of the parameters to review the progress made in each state under the mission.
Success, with caveats
The sanitation problem is more severe in rural areas, with 67 per cent of the population defecating in the open, according to the 2011 Census. The central government claims to have made considerable progress in rural areas since the launch of SBM. The rate of building toilets is 13 per cent more than what it was during the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA), a similar programme launched by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1999 (it ran till October 2, 2014).
The current government claims 23.69 million toilets have been built in the past two years and it was expecting to declare around 100 districts, comprising 150,000 villages, ODF by the end of this year.
Parameswaran Iyer, secretary, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, said the government was on the right track. "In the past two years, momentum has been built and we are hopeful that by end of this year, Kerala, Mizoram, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh would be ODF."
But success in these states should not be counted as a major achievement. These already had the lowest percentage of people defecating in the open. According to the 2011 Census, Kerala, Mizoram, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat had 5.5 per cent, 12.9 per cent, 32.5 per cent and 65.76 per cent of their rural populations, respectively, without toilets.
Big states such as Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh continue to be a problem. These have the highest number of people defecating in the open. Their performance under SBM was almost the same as it was under NBA. "Building toilets is a state's responsibility. We provide funds and exhort state governments to do more in these high-density areas with low sanitation coverage," said a senior government official.
Pinch of salt, with data
The central government is buoyed with 85,000 villages and around 20 districts becoming ODF since the launch. But, this data should be taken with a pinch of salt. These are self-declared ODF villages. No independent agency, not even the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), has verified these claims.
A recent survey by the Quality Council of India in 75 districts also highlighted the lack of sanitation in those which claimed to be ODF on the government website.
Chasing toilets, not habits
Kamal Kar, who pioneered the community-led total sanitation programmes in some Asian and African countries, is convinced that the government is "definitely on the wrong track and has adopted an erroneous approach". "The government is chasing toilets and not going after collective behaviour change. It is doing exactly what the other governments have done in the past 60 years," Kar said.
"The number of ODF districts declared by the current government is not accurate," he said. Kar said the current programme was likely to fail, but this time the stakes were high because of the involvement of international organisations.
Kar said lack of certainty could be the reason World Bank, which granted India a $1.5-billion sanitation loan, decided to get the progress of the scheme verified by independent agencies before releasing funds.
Many critics, including CAG, had raised questions on the authenticity of government data. An analysis of the numbers further belies the claims. For instance, by the end of 2001 and 2011, Jharkhand had 93 and 92 per cent rural households with no toilets, respectively. The figure came down to 66 per cent by the end of November 2015. This claim appears ambitious in the wake of the state government barely spending funds meant for sanitation and construction of toilets. Of the total funds available, Jharkhand spent 14.65 per cent, 10.68 per cent, 25.41 per cent, 49.3 per cent and 101.29 per cent in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, respectively. The CAG, in its 2013-14 report, found 66 per cent newly constructed toilets in Jharkhand were defunct.
The same analogy can be drawn for other states - Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
The CAG, in its report on the total sanitation programme, has accused the Union government of inflating the achievements. The inflated figures for Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha were 327 per cent, 277 per cent and 199 per cent, respectively. Similarly for Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh it was 182 per cent, 86 per cent, and 172 per cent, respectively.
It cannot be denied the government has managed to generate hype around the issue; but it still needs to convince people to use toilets.
