Wary that the toilets built under the Swachchh Bharat Mission (SBM) may not meet the fate of those constructed under the UPA’s Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan — where at least 276 lakh toilets were unaccounted for and an additional 141 lakh were defunct — the Modi Government has asked the States to consider giving incentives to the villagers to ensure their regular usage.
Presently, the Government is doling out Rs 12,000 subsidy for construction of toilets and 8 per cent of SBM budget is spent on creating awareness to make the Prime Minister Narender Modi’s pet project, a success.
However, with just 5,000 villages out of 40,000 villages who have declared themselves as Open Defecation Free, being found to be meeting parameters on verification, the officials feel there is a long way to go in actually triggering a behavioural change among villagers towards sanitation in a true sense.
The concern was reflected in the suggestion made by Union Minister of Water and Sanitation Birender Singh Chaudhary at the national level conference on the state water and sanitation ministers here.
He asked the State representatives and State Water and Sanitation ministers to consider incentivizing the villagers post toilet construction to ensure their regular usage.
Merely achieving the target of toilet construction will defeat the very purpose of the mission, rather more importance should be attached to the sustainability of the programme and change in attitude towards usage of the toilets, he said almost admitting it was not easy to do so.
For instance, he said there are some who just construct the toilet but do not have the capacity to clean them. Another category is of villagers who criticize the construction calling it wastage of space and third is the category of those who do not keep them clean after using them for some time, he added.
“Hence, after they construct toilets, they can be given incentives which can be continued for one or two years to encourage them to make its usage a regular habit,” he explained.
Also, in order to strengthen community process, we must invest in human resources-we need an army of trained motivators for each village, who can trigger the village and change their behavior, he said.
“Over 40,000 villages in the country have declared themselves as ODF. All of you are the process of these claims now following a common definition of ODF. I am sure you would have put in place robust mechanisms that capture this outcome on a sustainable basis.”
The Minister also said that it has been decided to increase spending from existing 8 per cent to 10 percent of the total SBM’s budget on various campaign and awareness programmes from next fiscal.