Urban areas of five BJP-ruled States namely Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Haryana have been declared 'Open Defecation Free' (ODF) on the completion of third anniversary of Swacch Bharat Mission on Monday. In all, 1,472 cities and towns of the total 4,041 have so far become ODF. Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Chandigarh have become ODF last year. Total seven states and a Union territory have been announced open defecation free so far.
Similarly, as against the target of building about 66 lakh individual household toilets in urban areas, 38 lakh toilets have already been built and construction of another 14 lakh toilets is in progress. Over two lakh community and public toilet seats have been built as against the mission target of five lakh toilet seats. This was announced by the Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Singh Puri on Monday. He was speaking at a programme on the occasion of the third anniversary of the mission. long before the Swachh Bharat Missin was launched, Sikkim became India's first open defecation free state in 2008 .
As far as ODF( rural) is concerned, out of 204,245 villages that self-declared to be open-defecation free (ODF), only 105,456 villages or 51.6 percent have been verified by state governments till date.
According to HUA statistics, with the six states, the target of 32 lakh toilets would be achieved - which is 50 percent of the target. Even as the six states have delivered good news, the mission has remained a non-starter in 10 states, including six north-eastern states. West Bengal, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Tripura, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur have less than 30% achievement rates. Tripura and Delhi have not built a single individual toilet. In Meghalaya, only one percent of the individual household toilets are under construction. The Swachh Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission), which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 2, 2014, with the aim to make India free of open defecation by October 2, 2019.
Earlier, speaking on the occasion of third anniversary, the HUA minister stated that the focus should be now on solid-waste management. "Efforts are on to generate over 500 MW of electricity and over 50 lakh tonnes of compost from municipal solid waste in order to process the entire solid waste generated in urban areas", Puri said. Stating that sanitation is a "birth right" and "individual responsibility", he claimed that the fortnight- long 'Swacchata-Hi-Sewa' campaign, which concluded on Monday, has witnessed participation from "over 80 lakh people spread over 3.50 lakh activities in urban areas".