-Newsclick.in An opaque policy, inefficiency and a flawed target plague this scheme. Over the past twelve months, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has been one of the most-cornered ministers of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, owing largely to her weak and often ambiguous comments on the state of the Indian economy. For her and her supporters, this year’s Union budget was meant to both rejuvenate and rekindle investor’s hopes and sentiments. The...
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India is not REALLY open-defecation free, but again, people may have lied: NSO report
-Financial Express An overwhelming number of Indians have claimed that they don’t have access to toilets, poking holes in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assertion of India having become open-defecation free under Swachh Bharat. But the NSO, which conducted the survey, also said that the respondents could not be fully trusted, and that they may have lied to underreport the access to toilets. About 30% of rural households lacked access to toilets...
More »Swachh Bharat In The City -Himanshu Gupta
-The Indian Express Urban areas require a different approach to end open defecation. The Swachh Bharat Mission is being executed by two different ministries — the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation for rural areas and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs for urban areas. In the rural areas, the major challenge was to change the mindset of the populace so that they would start using household toilets rather than...
More »Officials under pressure to meet toilet construction targets -Divya Trivedi
-Frontline.in Little seems to have improved in the five years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to make India open-defecation free (ODF) under the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) by the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi on October 2. Confounding government claims of Madhya Pradesh being ODF, two Dalit minors, Roshni (12) and Avinash (10), were lynched to death in Shivpuri district by their upper-caste neighbours on September 25 for...
More »Swachh Bharat Abhiyan: A not-so-clean account -Sukumar Muralidharan
-The Hindu Business Line The death of two children killed for relieving themselves in public just days before India was declared ‘open defecation free’ by the Prime Minister highlights the chasm between targets and solutions India was declared ‘open defecation free’ on October 2, Mahatma Gandhi’s 150-year birth anniversary. A target-oriented sanitation drive, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) was a signature programme of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first term in office. Rapid...
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