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The Swachh Bharat mission and the more recent Swachhta Hi Sewa campaign launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi seem to be generating quite a wave in the country. Recently, the Chief Minister of Puducherry, V NarayanSwami took up a spade to promote the Swachhta Hi Sewa campaign and cleaned a drain. The video of the CM cleaning a drain went viral. Some termed it as a political stunt while others saw it an an inspiring move.
All things said and done, the politician’s actions have once again ignited a debate on Swachh Bharat mission. Four years on, there are various views on the outcome of the much celebrated programme to clean up the country, but what we cannot deny is that the government has left no stone unturned to make Swachh Bharat into an eye-dazzling spectacle. A sum of Rs 16,500 crore has been earmarked by 71 ministries and departments of the central government for implementation of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) in 2018-19. Last year, around 530 crore is said to be spent only on advertisements. A number of celebrities such as Sachin Tendulkar, Amitabh Bachhan, and even comedian Kapil Sharma have been enlisted as ambassadors of this campaign. The videos of these people clinching brooms and cleaning up garbage have trended on the Internet.
According to government data, Swachh Bharat mission (rural) has had some success. The main goal of Swachh Bharat campaign is to make India open defecation free by 2019. The picture was bleak in the initial years. According to statistics in 2015, around 52 crore people, ie more than 60% of our population did not have access to basic amenities like toilets. However, progress seems to have been made in that direction, As per the data from Economic Survey 2017-18, only 39% population had access to toilets in 2014. By January 2018, this number had rapidly surged to 76%.
The opposition however claims that the government’s spending is misguided and it is not spending enough on creating ground-level awareness. It is stated that only 45% of the villages had been declared open defecation free as of 2017.
The Parliamentary Committee on Rural Development (2017-18) headed by Dr P Venugopal of AIADMK dismissed the claim of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS) that about 84 per cent of the rural areas of the country have sanitation coverage as of May 24, 2018. The report read: “The committee while examining the subject was of the view that the sanitation coverage figures seemed to be more on “Paper” but the actual progress at the ground level is very lethargic.”
Further on, it was said that the material being used for building a toilet is of poor quality. Also, the report observed that more needed to be done to inculcate a sense of hygiene and bring about a behavioural change in the rural populace.
