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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Jairam urges Manmohan to give highest priority to sanitation by K Balchand

Jairam urges Manmohan to give highest priority to sanitation by K Balchand

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published Published on Jan 17, 2012   modified Modified on Jan 17, 2012

Calling for urgent measures to provide sanitation facility across the country, Union Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh has pointed to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that in addition to malnutrition another distressing national shame which India can't live with is open defecation.

Mr. Ramesh, who also controls the Department of Drinking Water Supply which implements sanitation programme, has written a letter to the Prime Minister urging him to change the government's approach through a bold initiative during the 12th Five Year Plan pointing to the limitations of the present sanitation campaign. The Prime Minister had described the problem of malnutrition as a national shame the other day.

Incidentally, Mr. Ramesh's letter to Dr. Singh comes against the backdrop of the Supreme Court directing the States to provide at least temporary sanitation facilities in all schools.

In a recent study, UNICEF-WHO had estimated that at least 60 percent of India's population practiced open defecation and the country accounted for 58 percent of the open defecation in the world. Though China had a larger population only 4 percent practiced open defecation.

The adverse impact on health due to open defecations takes a toll of 6.4 percent of the GDP in India, according to the report.

Opposing the present Total Sanitation Campaign which seeks to provide individual toilets to rural households, schools and anganwadis and waste management, Mr. Ramesh urged the Prime Minister to give highest priority to sanitation during the next plan period commencing April.

Limitation

Because of the limitation in the present system, only 25,000 villages are claimed to have become “nirmal grams” out of which 9,000 are in Maharashtra alone. The progress has been limited in States such as Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala and Haryana.

The other reasons for poor performance were due to the limited focus on BPL families only and the admissible cost pegged at only Rs. 3,200 per unit against the general assessment of constructing a toilet is about Rs. 8,000 per unit.

The allocation too has been pathetic, just about Rs. 2,100 crore during the 10th Five Year Plan and Rs. 7,000 during the current 11th five Year Plan.

Mr. Ramesh estimated the requirement would be about Rs. 44,000 crore during the 12th Five Year Plan and accordingly petitioned the Planning Commission with the objective of covering at least 50 percent of the gram panchayats in the country by 2017 and the rest by 2022.

With the vastly increased outlay he has proposed to Dr. Singh to shift the focus from individual units to gram panchayat as the smallest unit of implementation under the restructured sanitation campaign. He also has proposed an increase in the cost of construction of one unit to Rs. 5,000. A higher outlay was also to meet the initiative of integrating housing, water supply and sanitation programme and because construction of toilets has been permitted under Mahatma Gandhi NREGA.


The Hindu, 17 January, 2012, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article2806719.ece


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