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Rajasthan town becomes defecation-free-Rukmini S
-The Hindu


Delayed payments to poor households threaten to scuttle scheme to build toilets under Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan

Churu (Rajasthan): Three years ago, Churu, a town of 1.2-lakh people in the Thar desert, was ranked India's dirtiest town by the Planning Commission. Two years ago, the overall district had over 40 per cent households with no toilet of their own. Today, the district is close to its goal of becoming open defecation-free, a distinction few districts in north India have achieved - thanks to a scheme launched under the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA).

However, poor implementation threatens to sabotage the good work done. Poor sanitation has a direct impact on the unexpectedly high rates of malnutrition in India, a nation responsible for 60 per cent of the world's open defecation. The 2011 census reinforced this connection as it revealed that over half of India's households have no toilets.

The rural sanitation campaign NBA (originally launched as the Total Sanitation Campaign in 1999) is aimed at eliminating open defecation by 2022 (revised from the earlier aim of 2017), NBA's joint director Sandhya Singh told The Hindu.

Churu District Collector Rohit Gupta, a 2006-batch IAS officer of the Rajasthan cadre, was determined to achieve this target when he took over in November last. "There is no justification we can give to our people and the world for why India has such high rates of open defecation, and of infant and child mortality. What we decided to do was have a comprehensive focus on malnutrition and health, and a major part of this was eliminating open defecation," Mr. Gupta told The Hindu.

Under the ingenious scheme, households which are below the poverty line, or from backward communities, or headed by single women, must build a toilet and provide photographic proof of it to the district authorities, who will then reimburse them with Rs. 9,100 - of which Rs. 4,600 would come from the NBA and Rs. 4,500 from the scheme under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).

Mr. Gupta has considerably streamlined the paperwork, district officials said.

The scheme was received with enthusiasm by the community. In Taranagar block's Anandsinghpura village, Ghashiram, a Scheduled Caste small farmer and labourer, is at work on his new house, built under the Indira Awas Yojana. The family has already built their first-ever toilet, partitioned with a cloth curtain. "When we earn some more money, we will finish the roof of our house and put a door on the toilet. But we have already started using it," he says. In Pithisar village in Churu block, Rameti Devi takes even her toddler to the new toilet the family has now built.

However, the otherwise well-organised procedure stands the risk of being stymied by delayed payments. In village after village, dozens of residents said that while they had built their toilets months ago and had the fact verified by district authorities, they hadn't yet got the total amount they were entitled to. While Rameti Devi posed proudly outside her new toilet, displaying a sign that advertises the promised subsidy amount to encourage others, she has not received the amount herself. While most families in Churu - a town where complete landlessness is rare as it is situated in a relatively prosperous region of the State - are willing to spend between Rs. 12,000 and Rs. 15,000 on building their toilet, they are nonetheless aggrieved at the prospect of not being reimbursed the promised subsidy amount. Others, like Mani Ram, a Scheduled Caste father of three who runs a barber shop in Pithisar village, are unwilling to build toilets until they are at least sanctioned the subsidy. At Lunas village, Jaichand Sharma, the well-to-do husband of the sarpanch, has paid out of his pocket for dozens of toilets to be built so that his village could be declared open defecation-free. "I want my village to be a model village, one that people come to see for its cleanliness. I had the money, so I paid for the toilets. If the subsidy does come some day and the beneficiaries decide to give it to me, then that's fine, otherwise I, don't really mind," Mr. Sharma told The Hindu.

Mr. Gupta is anxious that delayed payments should not discourage poor families from building toilets. He concedes that the delay could arise either due to shortage of funds (an issue that the district has faced over the last two months) or from the time it takes to complete government paperwork - both being issues that he cannot fix at his level. Mr. Gupta says that while the stringent requirement of documentation has reduced the siphoning off of funds, it has led to big delays in payments. Moreover, the NBA part of the funds can be released only after the MGNREGA component, notoriously delayed across the country, is released.

The other shortcoming in Churu is that relatively little has happened by way of urban sanitation, a criticism that has been made of the Indian sanitation mission as a whole. On both sides of the railway track near Agrasen Nagar in Churu is a slum made up of shacks made with tarpaulin and discarded banners. "We all have to go in the open, because there is no toilet around," says Chand Khan, who works as an auto mechanic. Says his wife Raziya, "We women have to get up even earlier, when it's still dark. When it rains or we're sick, it's very difficult."

Under the Chief Minister's BPL Awas Yojana, poor urban households get an extra Rs. 5,000 for a toilet in addition to the Rs. 70,000 they get to construct a house. Over 200 proposals were passed earlier, but no new proposals have been cleared, municipal council chairman Govind Mehensariya said.

The Hindu, 16 October, 2013, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/rajasth
an-town-becomes-defecationfree/article5237914.ece?homepage
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