-Down to Earth According to high-level government sources, the survey results contradict the government’s open-defecation free status claim A copy of the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO)’s latest survey on the state of toilet coverage and use at the household level in India was doing the rounds among officials. The ‘draft’ report, accessed by Down To Earth, pegged toilet coverage in India at only 75 per cent. Close to 80 per cent of...

-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...

-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...

-Press release of 4th All India Media Conference, dated 8 October, 2019 Udaipur, Oct. 8: More than 300 media practitioners, researchers, scholars and educationists from different states of India and from four foreign countries took a pledge to empower the underprivileged sections of society by ending the digital divide and create new opportunities to highlight the issues of common people, rural areas, landless labourers, malnourished children and farmers affected by climate...

-The Hindu The campaign to end open defecation can succeed only if it takes communities with it India’s declaration on the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi that its rural areas are now open defecation-free will be acknowledged around the world as a milestone in its developmental journey. Cleanliness and sanitation were central to Gandhi’s concerns for his vast number of impoverished countrymen, and should ideally have been pursued zealously by governments...