CURRENT AFFAIRS

Description

Introduction

Proper sanitation and hygiene are essential inputs not only for healthy and disease free living but also for a dignified life as a human being.

The ancient Indus valley civilisation accorded prime importance to sanitation by meticulously integrating sanitation systems into town planning.

Although sanitation and hygiene are considered to be virtues in all cultures and religions of the world, prevalence of unsanitary conditions have been a problem faced by most of the countries at some point of time in the process of their economic development.

Lack of sanitation has been recognized as a major problem in India. Thus government has launched Swachh Bharat Mission.

What?

It is a nation-wide cleanliness campaign launched in Urban and Rural areas.

SBA- Urban: By Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs

SBA-Grameen: By Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation

Includes:

· construction of household owned and community owned toilets,

· elimination of open defecation

· eradication of manual scavenging,

· solid waste management

· Behavioural change

When?

Announced on 02 October, 2014. Launched to give tribute to the Father of the Nation on his 150th birth anniversary. 

Who?

The different stakeholders are:

· Government Ministries and government machinery

· Citizen of India

· Individuals and philanthropists will contribute through Swachh Bharat Kosh

· Special clean-up initiative will be focused on select iconic heritage, spiritual and cultural places in the country under Swachh Iconic Places

Why?

· The sanitation coverage of India was as low as 39 per cent till 2014.

· Around 55 Crore people in rural areas were without a toilet facility before 2014.  This was severely impacting the health, and also the dignity of people in rural areas, especially of women and children.

Steps Taken Previously

· The Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) was started in 1986 for rural sanitation. CRSP focused mainly on toilet construction and related funds allocation, there was no stress on behaviour change. As a result, the supply based approach did not achieve desired results.

·  Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC)was launched in 1999 followed by Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in 2012. But lacking a strong behaviour change approach, these programmes also failed to make a strong impact.

How? Implementation Mechanism

·   The Prime Minister himself has been the Communicator-in-Chief of the Mission. Connecting sanitation with human dignity and integrity. He personally wrote to all 250,000 Gram Pradhans motivating them to help people in their villages achieve sanitation services.

·   Anybody who volunteered for the Swachh Bharat Mission was called Swachhagrahi, who regularly mobilized community members for toilet construction and its usage.

SBM adopts a multi-faceted approach

·  Instil Behaviour change: Incentivizing the performance of State-level institutions to implement activities for behavioural change among communities. Emphasising on awareness generation, triggering mind-set changes, leading to community behaviour change and demand generation for sanitary facilities in houses, schools, anganwadis, places of community congregation and for solid and liquid waste management activities.

·  Community participation: Ensuring appropriate participation of the beneficiary/communities, financially or otherwise, in the setting up of the toilets to promote ownership and sustained use.

·   Capacity Building: SBM augments the institutional capacity of districts to change behaviour at the grassroots level and strengthen the capacities of implementing agencies so that the programme could be rolled in a time-bound manner and collective outcomes could be measured.

·   Broad-based Engagement: SBM set up the Swachh Bharat Kosh to encourage Corporate Social Responsibility and accept contributions from private organizations, individuals and philanthropists.

·  Use of Technology: Information technology and social media is imperative to this program as it allows citizens to keep a check on the availability of toilets for every rural household in India. Nearly 90 per cent of all SBM toilets have already been geo-tagged. Many mobile applications have been launched by not only the government but also by few citizens, which direct the municipal corporations’ attention towards unclean areas.

Achievements

·   As on 18 April, 2022, about 11.5 crore Individual House-Hold Latrines (IHHLs) have been constructed in the country under SBM (G).

·   As per the results of National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) from 2017-18 to 2019-20, 99.6% of the households who had access to toilets, had availability of water, and 95.2% of rural population who had access to a toilet, were using it.

·   As on September 21, 2022, 114098 villages have become ODF Plus. These villages are sustaining their ODF status and have systems in place for managing solid and/or liquid waste.

·   As on date, 4 cities namely, Indore (Madhya Pradesh), Ambikapur (Chattisgarh), Navi Mumbai (Maharashtra) and Mysuru (Karnataka) have been certified as 5-star cities.

·   Indore further cemented its position by emerging as India’s first 7-star Garbage Free city, while Surat, Bhopal, Mysuru, Navi Mumbai, Vishakhapatnam, and Tirupati earned 5-star Garbage Free certifications.

Reasons for Success when compared with past schemes

·    In the new SBM Programme, funding has been delinked from the livelihood Programme, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), since that was leading to inefficiencies and delays in implementation.

·    Fund is also provided for SLWM (solid and liquid waste management).

·    Swachh cess and Swachh Bharat Kosh have been formed

·   There is immense socio-economic-geographic cultural-language diversity in India. The States are best placed to decide what kind of strategy, approach and technology suits them the most, in order to reach the desirable outcomes. Closer coordination with the States than before is being brought about by measures such as holding workshops in the States, exposing the key state/district officials to the approach of community processes for reinforcing the message, cross sharing of best practices across states by holding regional/ national workshops, visits to states, reviews and video conferencing

·    Use of Technology for Geo-tagging, for better sanitation management, etc.

Social and Financial Impacts

·  Medical costs averted: financial savings from paying less medical costs based on reductions in illness episodes (average INR 8,024 per household per year).

     ·  Value of time savings: reduced time lost from sickness and seeking a place for open defecation (average INR 24,646 per household per year)

     ·  Value of saved lives: economic value of saved lives due to lower mortality rates (average INR 17,622 per household per year.

     ·  Property value: INR 18,991 per household was estimated as the average increase in property value from having a toilet.

    ·  As a result of the Swachh Bharat Mission, 55 crore people changed their behaviour and started using toilets. With the attainment of Swachh Bharat, there has been a significant reduction in water and sanitation related diseases. The Swachh Bharat Mission has resulted in an annual profit of more than Rs. 50,000 per household in rural India.

Challenges

·         Behavioral change is the critical component required to improve sanitation. It is when people use a latrine, rather than when one is constructed, that the wider benefits are realized. The 15^th Finance Commission (2020) noted that the practice of open defecation is still prevalent, despite access to toilets and highlighted that there is a need to sustain the behavioural change of people for using toilets. 

·         Standing Committee on Rural Development raised serious concerns over usage of low quality of raw materials Construction of toilets without adequate availability of water will be an impediment to achieving 100% sanitation coverage in rural areas.  The Committee recommended that provision of water availability should be prioritised along with construction of toilets to attain ODF status across all villages.

·         SLWM has traditionally represented unique challenges in rural areas, due to the practice of open defecation and indiscriminate dumping of solid and liquid waste.  The lack of waste segregation and dispersed population further creates roadblocks in bringing economically viable market-based solutions.

·         The 15^th Finance Commission also noted that the scheme only provides financial incentives to construct latrines to households below the poverty line (BPL) and selected households above the poverty line.  It highlighted that there are considerable exclusion errors in finding BPL households and recommended the universalisation of the scheme to achieve 100% ODF status.

·         The Standing Committee on Urban Development noted in early 2020 that toilets built under the scheme in areas including East Delhi are of very poor quality, and do not have adequate maintenance.  Further, only 1,276 of the 4,320 cities declared to be open defecation free have toilets with water, maintenance, and hygiene.  Additionally, it also highlighted in September 2020 that uneven release of funds for solid waste management across states/UTs needs to be corrected to ensure fair implementation of the programme. 

·         The Standing Committee on Urban Development (2021) also expressed concern about the slow pace in achieving targets for source segregation and waste processing.  The completion of their targets stood at 78% and 68% respectively of the goal set under SBM-Urban during 2020-21.  In addition, other targets related to the door-to-door collection of waste also remained unfulfilled

·         In certain subpopulations of India due to religious reasons: latrines close to the home are considered ritually polluting. Individuals are reluctant to empty the pit

·         The focus on short-term solutions also disregards efforts for maintenance. Even in municipal schools that have toilets, lack of funding from public institutions for maintenance leaves toilets broken and unusable. If the toilet stops working they just lock the door and no one does anything, so basically things fail because of lack of municipal support.

Recommendations

To make the sanitation sustainable the first principle is to recognise that excreta and wastewater are not wastes, but resources that are valuable and can be reused and recycled.

The conventional design of toilets in India considers human excreta and urine as a waste and based on the premise that it should be disposed off, but by applying innovative technologies, proper recycling, and waste management it can turn as a valuable resource. 

The World Bank has also recommended following steps for maintaining sustainable sanitation.

1.      Increasing political will and administrative commitment by identifying and creating local sanitation champions at the district level – for example, through exposure visits and evidence-based advocacy – and addressing key institutional bottlenecks such by supporting the state to formulate a state-specific sanitation policy.

2.      Providing technical support to selected districts to demonstrate that sanitation can be delivered at the scale of a district and in a sustainable manner, and to develop district-wide approaches that are tailored to a particular state.

3.      Supporting the strengthening of state governments’ institutional capacity to roll out the successful models to other districts, eventually covering the entire state.

SBM Phase II

In March 2020, the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation launched Phase II of SBM-Gramin which will focus on ODF Plus, and will be implemented from 2020-21 to 2024-25 with an outlay of Rs 1.41 lakh crore.  ODF Plus includes sustaining the ODF status, and solid and liquid waste management.  Specifically, it will ensure that effective solid and liquid waste management is instituted in every Gram Panchayat of the country.

Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0, launched by the Prime Minister on 1^st October 2022 with the overall vision of creating ‘Garbage Free Cities’, has introduced Used Water Management as a newly funded component for towns with less than 1 lakh population. This showcases the Mission’s commitments to improving the overall Used Water Management ecosystem in Urban India by ensuring that no un-treated used water is discharged into water bodies (as per the Water+ Protocol). Under the Mission, maximum reuse of treated used water is a key area focus along with eradication of hazardous entry into sewers and septic tanks through mechanization of their cleaning operations.

After becoming Open Defecation Free (ODF), many villages have seen a reduction in the number of deaths due to diseases like diarrhoea, malaria etc. Child health and nutrition have also improved.