Swachh Bharat Mission well on track to achieve ODF India by Oct. 2019 : Govt

Speed Post News Network

New Delhi : Under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen), over 5.4 lakh villages and 585 districts have been declared Open Defecation Free (ODF) and  27 States and Union Territories have declared themselves ODF so far. Over 9 crore toilets have been built across rural India so far taking the national rural sanitation coverage up from 39% in 2014 to over 98% today.

This progress has been independently verified by a largescale third-party National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey 2017-18 under the World Bank-supported project across 90,000 households in over 6,000 villages, which found the rural toilet usage to be 93.4%. Two more independent surveys conducted in the past by the Quality Council of India in 2017, and National Sample Survey Organization in 2016, also found the usage of these toilets to be 91% and 95% respectively. The Mission is on track to achieve an ODF India by October 2019.

In this context, the Ministry has come across media reports quoting certain surveys rife with methodological and technical deficiencies. A recent study, titled “Changes in open defecation in rural North India: 2014-2018”, grossly misleads the reader and does not reflect the ground reality, said a PIB release.

Some of the deficiencies and gaps found in the report are : The report quotes a survey of merely 1,558 households in 157 villages against a total of nearly five crore households and 2.3 lakh villages in the four States surveyed – Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the survey also covers only 2 (out of 33) districts of in Rajasthan, 3 (out of 38) districts in Bihar, 3 (out of 75) districts in UP and 3 (out of 52) districts in Madhya Pradesh, and comes up with extrapolations and exaggerated judgements on sanitation status across these States.

The report also repeatedly mentions that the survey was conducted in “late 2018”, but conspicuously fails to mention the exact dates, which is very misleading as the SBM is an extremely fast moving programme, and sanitation status has changed exponentially, on a month to month basis, in the last year. The 2018 survey adds 21% new Households as compared to 2014. In such a small survey, an inclusion of overall 21% new Households (as high as 1/3rd in Rajasthan and MP) can substantially alter the outcome and renders the results non-comparable. The key question is on ownership of toilets and not access to a toilet. In reality, some households share toilets, and some use community and public toilets when they may not have a personal household toilet. This is not covered at all through the questionnaire used in the study.

Given the glaring gaps in the aforementioned survey, the Ministry of Drinking Water & Sanitation would like to highlight that reports based on such erroneous, inconsistent and biased studies serve to mislead readers, according to a PIB release.