Total Sanitation Campaign: Still Miles To Go in Assam
By Sazzad Hussain
10 January, 2014
Countercurrents.org
As the world observed the inaugural World Toilet Day on 19th November, India missed the bus of nations enjoying the status of having sanitation facilities by most of its citizens. Even our neighbour Bangladesh has the envious record of having 93% of the population having access to toilets. But in India about 638 million people, or more than half of those residing in the second-most populous nation on Earth, defecate in the open. On a planet where one in three doesn’t have access to proper sanitation, toilets are out of reach for 53 percent of India’s 1.2 billion residents left with little choice but to go outdoors, according to UNICEF. India’s Total Sanitation Program, which started in 2001, helped cut open defecation in the country by more than 10 percent in as many years, according to the study released by the World Bank. However this is still a distant dream for many Indians to own or access to toilets. In Assam the story is same. Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) in the state is still far behind than expectation and official records do not match what are found in the field.
“Having access to a toilet is still an alien concept in India,” said Subramanya Kusnur, chairman and chief executive officer of Aquakraft Projects Ltd., a company that’s setting up water vending machines in rural India. Remedying the dearth of toilets, its toll on children from diarrhea and other diseases related to dirty water and sanitation, and the lack of a safe clean place to go is the challenge facing India. 53% of Indian households, (an improvement from 63.6% in 2001) around 600 million people, defecate in the open without using a toilet or latrine, according to a 2012 report by the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
According to the UN, open defecation is the riskiest sanitation practice, one of the main causes of diarrhea. Each day about 3,000 children age 4 and younger die from it, most before their second birthday. Use of simple pit toilets helped 6-year-old Indian children study better because of improved physical and mental health, according to a World Bank study based on a government-run sanitation program. Children living in villages in which more latrines had been constructed by their first year of life were more likely to recognize letters and numbers when they are 6, the World Bank paper showed. Open defecation remains a threat to India’s labor force. Waterborne diseases deprive India of 73 million working days each year and along with the health impact affects economic gains, according to a report by the Water Aid group.
Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) or Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) is a Community-led total sanitation program initiated by Government of India under Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation in 1999. It is a demand-driven and people-centered sanitation program. The main goal of Total Sanitation Campaign is to eradicate the practice of open defecation by 2017. Community-led total sanitation is not focused on building infrastructure, but on changing cultural norms to prevent open defecation. The revised approach emphasized more on Information, Education and Communication (IEC), Human Resource Development, Capacity Development activities to increase awareness among the rural people and generation of demand for sanitary facilities. This enhanced people’s capacity to choose appropriate options through alternate delivery mechanisms as per their economic condition. The Programme was implemented with focus on community-led and people centered initiatives. Financial incentives were provided to Below Poverty Line (BPL) households for construction and usage of individual household latrines (IHHL) in recognition of their achievements. Assistance was also extended for construction of school toilet units, Anganwadi toilets and Community Sanitary Complexes (CSC) apart from undertaking activities under Solid and Liquid Waste Management (SLWM). Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) envisages covering the entire community for saturated outcomes with a view to create Nirmal Gram Panchayats with priorities like provisions of Individual Household Latrin (IHHL) for both BPL and APL households within a GP, provisions for sanitation facilities in Government Schools, Anganwadi centres in Government buildings within the GP, Solid and Liquid Waste Management (SLWM) for proposed and existing Nirmal Grams, extensive capacity building of the stake holders like Panchayati Raj Institutions, Village Water and Sanitation Committees (VWSCs), appropriate convergence with MNREGS with unskilled man-days and skilled man-days. The main objective of TSC or NBA is to bring about an improvement in general quality of life in rural areas and accelerate sanitation coverage in rural areas to achieve Nirmal Bharat by 2022 (2017 is the UNMDP target) with all GPs. One of the key elements of the objectives of TSC is to undertake proactive promotion of hygiene education and sanitary habits among students by covering all the schools that are not covered by SSA and Anganwadi Centres.
In most of the cases TSC are implemented on the ground. “Under the Total Sanitation Campaign, many so-called toilets have been constructed by the government, but it has not given any focus to community mobilization or spreading awareness regarding the importance of toilets,” says Rajive Ranjan from the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Institute (WASHi), which has been working for sanitation capacity building in India.
There are more than 12 lakh households in Assam which have not had access to toilets. Despite the Total Sanitation Campaign, the practice of open defecation continues in the State. In Assam, the Public Health Engineering Department (PHE) is implementing the Total Sanitation Campaign. The department had set a target of bringing 22,20,017 BPL households under the sanitation programme. Of this, so far 17,33,870 households have been covered with an achievement of 78%. The PHE department had set a target of covering 11,61,020 Above Poverty Line (APL) households under the Total Sanitation Campaign. Of these, 5,13,421 APL households have been covered with an achievement rate of 44.22%. Here the state PHE department lags far behind the target objective where much is yet to be done. Together the total project objectives IHHL is 33,81,037 in Assam where the success rate is 66.47%. Though the state has impressive success rate of achieving 98.03% in school toilets it has a dismal figure of only 29.86% in achieving Sanitary Complexes. Similarly in Anganwadi Toilet projects 66.15% performance has been achieved by PHE in Assam. Thus, a total of 11,33,746 households in Assam still remain to be covered under the Total Sanitation Campaign. The PHE Department must work rapidly to provide sanitation facilities to these households in order to achieve the ambitious sanitation target under the Total Sanitation Campaign.
Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh recently said that India would take another 8-10 years to ensure it’s free of open defecation, acknowledging the possibility of achieving TSC as a distant dream. However other than the physical achievements and policy implementation, it is the awareness and public participation which hold the key in providing and accessing sanitation facilities in our country. Therefore the approach must be, as said by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon while declaring the inaugural World Toilet Day, “Let’s break the taboos and make sanitation for all a global development priority.”
(The writer is a fellow, National Foundation of India, New Delhi)
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