Freedom from Filth
- In Current Affairs
- 12:01 PM, Aug 19, 2017
- Bhanoji Rao
At the outset, we should all be grateful to the Prime Minister and his team for understating our hearts and launching campaigns to safeguard and cement our hard-won freedom.
The Hindu of July 31 quoted the Prime Minister as stating in his monthly Man Ki Baat, “We must make 2017 our Year of Resolve. In this month of August, we have to come together and resolve: Filth — Quit India; Poverty — Quit India; Corruption — Quit India; Terrorism — Quit India; Casteism — Quit India; Communalism — Quit India.”
This piece deals with freedom from filth. It is important we have ‘freedom from filth’, which also bestows freedom from mosquitos and other disease inflicting insects. As a movement, it is as important as any other dimension of development.
Swachh Bharat Mission
In May 2014, Prime Minister Modi took oath of office. Within months after taking office, on October 2, the birthday of Gandhiji, the Prime Minister launched the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission, with the goal of making India Open Defecation Free and Clean by 2nd October 2019 which is the 150th birth anniversary of the Mahatma. The Mission has two wings – one for rural and one for urban. As part of the activities of the first, over 45 million household toilets were built. A key component of the second was the launching of the first ever (2016) Swachh Survekshan Report, which ranked 73 cities of India on the status of sanitation and waste management. The 2017 report covered 434 cities, indeed a quantum jump from the first.
The parameters that go into the ranking of the cities and the percentage weights are: waste collection, sweeping and transportation (40%), MSW processing and disposal (20%), ODF and toilets (30%) and information/education and capacity building (5% each). The parameters are all within the action orbits of local governments and hence are a good indicator of the efficacy of their efforts.
The ranks produced in the 2017 report, released in early May, are indeed revealing. Of the 434 cities covered, top in sanitation and waste management is Indore, with Bhopal and Visakhapatnam at 2nd and 3rd places. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, it is common practice to applaud the cleanliness of the then Bombay and Madras. Well, their ranks respectively were 29 and 235. The national capital too is nowhere near the top: Delhi Cantonment at rank 172, South Delhi 202 and North Delhi 279.
Need for Evaluation
The Live Mint of July 10 carried an article titled Is the Swachh Bharat Mission Succeeding? And the next line says: “Nobody knows because there is no credible independent survey that can offer a useful nationally representative estimate of open defecation.”
There is no doubt that credibility is the order of the day in a democracy. Consider the fact that some cities are ranked great. Ground reality may differ. I know one city which fared well. It has some areas, almost exclusively the habitats of the rich and famous. When I was growing up, in the 1950s, whenever I visited that city, I used to go around those areas and simply look at the clean roads, beautiful buildings and few people. Those area remain pretty clean now also. Then I knew some areas that had clogged drains and got flooded in rains. They did not change much. Yes, there was one glaring difference: some of the roads that had OD got the status of ODF. That does not mean the whole city had changed its stature.
October 2019 is just two years away. It is time a half-yearly national sanitation survey is put in place and action taken to achieve the key objective of ODF, a boon to safeguarding the health of millions of rural and urban poor.
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