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Swachh drive: Spirit high, odds higher -Subodh Varma
-The Times of India

When Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi asked students of Bengaluru's Mount Carmel if the Modi government's Swachh Bharat Mission was working, he got a mixed response. An analysis of the campaign, well over a year now, shows the progress report is mixed too.

Last year, on October 2, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the ambitious Swachh Bharat Mission, promising to provide toilets to Indian households that still did not have one, and clean up the country by 2019. An avalanche of publicity followed, with netas small and big sweeping the streets and everybody from school kids to bureaucrats taking oaths to clean India.

The good news is that there has been a surge in the number of household toilets built since the Mission was launched. Between November 2014 and October 2015, more than 98 lakh toilets were built, according to the ministry of drinking water and sanitation. This was almost double the number built in the corresponding period of the previous three years.

But, set against a longer time frame, some sobering truths emerge. Between 2004 and 2009, the first UPA government built 4.6 crore toilets. That's an average of about 92 lakh toilets a year. Then, between 2009 and 2014, the second UPA government built 4.3 crore more toilets, at an average of about 86 lakh toilets per year. The Modi government, in its 17 months, is actually lagging behind these averages, having built an average of 78 lakh toilets on a per year basis. But the spirit appears to be unflagging.

The more worrying part is not the political comparison but the overall target of providing toilets to all. The government has adopted a revised assessment of how many households do not have toilets. Census 2011 had said such households were 67.3% of all Indian households. The government, however, has adopted the NSSO's figure of 59.4% based on a 2012 sample survey. Even this has been nudged up slightly by the ministry of sanitation to 55.5%.

"The ministry of drinking water and sanitation arrived at this revised figure on the basis of their own survey in March this year," said Ashok Kumar Jain, adviser at Niti Aayog, who has been involved in the Swachh Bharat Mission.

By the 2012 data, there is need to build 9.47 crore individual toilets. Deducting all the toilets built since 2012, there are still 7.45 crore toilets to be built in the remaining three-and-a-half years to 2019. That works out to over 2.1 crore toilets per year to be made from now on. That's a very tall order and the present Mission is falling way short.

Meanwhile, costs have zoomed up from about Rs 1,000 per toilet built back in 2004-05 to over Rs 9,600 currently. These are not actual costs incurred for constructing toilets but total expenditure by the government - both central and state - and beneficiaries, expressed in proportion to the toilets actually made. Government expenditure should be seen more as an "incentive", says Jain.

The other concern is the implementation of this mission in urban areas. Here, the situation is dire. Urban India generates 1,45,085 metric tons of solid municipal waste (garbage) every day. And, just 17% of it is being processed as of October 2015, according to the ministry. In 59% of the 78,660 municipal wards across the country, complete garbage collection services do not even exist - families dispose of their domestic waste as they deem fit.

The Swachh Bharat Mission's urban component had sought a 'Swachh City Plan' from each of the 82 million-plus cities to set the ball rolling. Till October 2015, just 19 such plans had been prepared. Of the nearly 32 lakh applications received for building individual toilets in urban areas, just 5.3 lakh have been made. Out of the over one lakh toilet seats in community toilet blocks that were identified, just over 27,000 have been made. Clearly, the urban part of the Swachh Bharat Mission is in much deeper trouble.