Marching towards Swacch Bharath

Improving access to safe water and sanitation facilities leads to healthier families and communities. The United Nations General Assembly has recognized drinking water and sanitation as a human right. The WHO/UNICEF joint monitoring programme for water supply and sanitation (JMP) monitored the progress towards MDG target to halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The final report in 2015 stated that the world has made a significant progress with 91% of the global population (6.6 billion) using an improved drinking water source. And, use of improved sanitation facilities rose from 54 per cent to 68 per cent globally. South-eastern Asia also achieved a significant increase of 24 percentage points, but narrowly missed the target.Also, it also has brought about issues of regional variation between countries and urban rural disparities.

Constant efforts have been made in this direction starting from the Bhore committee in 1946 to Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme (1972). In 1981, Government of India also launched the international water supply and sanitation decade (1981-1990) programme with one of the targets being 100% coverage of rural and urban population with safe drinking water supply facilities. To supplement this effort, Technology Mission for drinking water was set up in 1986 which was renamed as Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission in 1991. Again in 1999, the department of drinking water supply was created in the ministry of rural development. All these initiatives wanted to achieve the target of 100% coverage with safe drinking water by 2015. One of the norms was to provide 40 litres of safe drinking water per capita per day, establishing one hand-pump or stand post for every 250 persons and the water source should exist within the habitation / within 1.6 kilometres in the plains and within 100 Metres elevation in the hilly areas. Swajaldhara was launched in 2002 to provide safe drinking water in rural areas, with full ownership of the community.

With these many initiatives, the National family health survey-III (2005-06) projected that only 25% of households in India had private water supply facility, 18% used public water supply and 43% used tube wells. The Department of drinking water supply said that the drinking water coverage was 66.4% in rural areas. And, the census 2011 reveals only 47% have house service connections, a good 36% still have to fetch water located within 500 metres in rural areas.There appeared to be little consensus in the data reported by various departments.The report also stressed the need for more accurate data gathering worldwide focussing on the gaps.

Further impetus was given by launching the Swach Bharat Abhiyan or Clean India Mission, a country-wide campaign from 2014 to 2019, to eliminate open defecation. It also included eradication of manual scavenging, generating awareness and bringing about a behaviour change regarding sanitation practices, and augmentation of capacity at the local level.

Following this, the National family health survey-4(2015-16), projected that almost all urban households (91%) and rural households (89%) had access to an improved source of drinking water. In rural areas, 58 percent of households had water on their premises or delivered to their dwelling, compared with 82 percent in urban areas. Also, the report of joint monitoring committee (2015) stated that India had achieved the target of MDG. And, 71.3% of the households in rural areas and 96.2% in urban areas had access to latrine. Among the households which had access to latrines, about 3.5% of the household members in the rural areas and about 1.7% of the household members in the urban areas never used latrine. The percentage of households practicing open defecation decreased from 55 percent in 2005-06 to 39 percent in 2015-16.

Interestingly, a grass root situation analysisby the author in 2013-14, of 74 villages in a select Taluk in Tamilnadu revealed, the water supply system was available and accessible to all the villages. Though the supply was not continuous, at least interrupted water supply system had been established. In case of power crisis, alternative supply was also made available. Bore wells though present were either functioning but not used due to various reasons and the non- functioning bore wells were left unattended People were also using pond water in few villages. The only lacunaewas, water was never subjected for quality standard testing since its establishment. Chlorination of the overhead tanks was not satisfactory. It was not done regularly and in a scientific way.

Regarding the availability of toilets, it was only 22%. The community toilet initiative being constructedto promote the availability of toilets in ruralareas was not constructed in all the villages. Itseffective use also was grossly inadequate in the villageswhere it was already constructed. The knowledgeabout the government giving subsidy to constructtoilets was also lacking.

All these reflect the wide disparities in the reporting systems from various departments. Also, it high lights an urgent need to develop an uniform system of assessment not onlyto monitor the progress towards the MDG goal, but also to measure the achievements of “SWACCH BHARAT”.