The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) doesn’t seem to have much hope from the ongoing Modi Government’s pet project Swachchh Bharat Mission pointing out that such sanitation schemes launched in the past too have failed to achieve the desired results.
The Government auditor has attributed the failure of the past schemes to planning level weaknesses leading to large-scale diversions, wastages and irregularities.
The CAG said unless implementation is based on realistic planning and is backed by largescale information, education and communication campaigns to bring about behavioural changes in the target population and overall governance at the grass-roots level improves, mere deployment of resources may not have any significant impact.
“...Audit clearly reveals the failure of the sanitation programmes in achieving the envisaged targets,” the report on performance audit of total sanitation campaign/Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan said.
The CAG pointed out that while the Swachchh Bharat Mission was launched by the Prime Minister on October 2, 2014 with an aim of 100 per cent open defecation free India by 2019, before this similar targets for eradication of open defecation were set out for 2012, revised to 2017 and again set out for 2022.
“The conceptual frame-work kept changing from supply driven to demand driven and finally to ‘saturation and convergence’ approach, yet the lessons learnt and experimentations through this long journey do not seem to have made much impact on the sanitation status in the country,” the country’s top auditor said.
The CAG said its audit has brought out planning level weaknesses which were critical for the success of the programme. Nearly Rs 10,000 crore was spent on the rural sanitation programme by the Central Government in the five years covered by audit and large scale diversions, wastages and irregularities were noted, it said.
“More than 30 per cent of individual household latrines were defunct/non-functional for reasons like poor quality of construction, incomplete structure, non-maintenance,” it pointed out.