India built 11.03 crore individual household latrines (IHHL) all over the country since 2014-15, said the Jal Shakti Ministry on March 31, 2022 in answer to a question regarding the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM).

On Thursday, Congress MPs Anto Antony, K. Muraleedharan, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Dr. Mohammad Jawed asked Union Minister Prahlad Singh Patel about the data on construction of toilets under SBM. In response, Patel shared data that showed construction of toilets had declined somewhat since 2019-20 with 1.19 cr toilets. In the previous year, the government claimed to have built 2.36 cr toilets across the country.

During pandemic years 2020-21 and 2021-22, 47.66 lakh toilets and 20.71 toilets were built respectively. Further, Patel said, “Under SBM (Urban), 62,64,914 individual household toilets have been constructed since 2014-15, as per the information received from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. Year-wise details of toilets constructed under SBM (U) are not maintained.”

Enquiring MPs also asked the Ministry about the allegations of fabricated data that said 30 percent of the data reported for both SBM Urban and SBM Gramin on the official websites is allegedly “manufactured”. Further, it is claimed that 12 lakh toilets reported as constructed between 2014 and 2020 are allegedly fictitious.

However, the Minister said no such report regarding manufactured data was received by the Ministry and thus did not take action on the same.

“Geo-tagging of toilets has been made mandatory to ensure that manufactured data do not creep in,” said Patel.

The SBM is an important aspect of the ruling regime’s scheme as it was much touted in 2014. The scheme was also expected to alleviate the troubles of rural India. However, a 2021 SabrangIndia interview with sanitation crusader Pragya Akhilesh explained how the Mission left much wanting despite huge figures.

She pointed out that rather than construction of new toilets, there should be more focus on the eradication of previously-constructed dry latrines. The sanitary toilets built under the SBM also have their unique problems like lack of water supply. As such these toilets too become a burden for India’s sanitation workers, who are forced to manually scavenge excreta from the toilets because of unavailability of continued water supply.

Aside from toilets, BJP MP Mohanbhai Kalyanji Kundariy also asked about the distribution of solar water pumps to small and marginal farmers under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Urja Suraksha evam Utthaan Mahabhiyan (PM-KUSUM).

New and Renewable Energy and Power Minister R. K. Singh answered that around 3.59 lakh standalone solar water pumps for farmers including small and marginal farmers across India. Of these, 82,408 pumps have been installed. Particularly in Uttar Pradesh, 20 thousand pumps were sanctioned with 6,842 pumps installed by 2022. In 2017, the installation of such solar pumps was a major promise of the Yogi-led BJP party in UP.

However, during recent elections, farmers body Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) announced that the government had failed on these promises when it provided 6,068 energy efficient pumps to UP farmers, falling short of the 10 lakh farmers goal. Yet, again in 2022, the government promised solar pumps under the PM-KUSUM.

The full list of state-wise sanctioned and installed pumps are as below:

Related:

SKM denounces BJP manifesto
Budget 2022 ignores struggling farming sector
Unmaintained Toilets ‘hotbeds’ of Corona spread in India: Pragya Akhilesh
Swachh Bharat: Who Will Clean & Empty Out 9.8 Crore Septic Tanks/Pits?

The post 11.03 cr toilets and 3.59 lakh solar pumps built in India: Centre appeared first on SabrangIndia.

New Delhi: An East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) worker cleaning a public toilet ahead of its inauguration.

With a year to go, different voices, including from the finance ministry and the Economic Advisory Council, have echoed the Prime Minister’s in declaring the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) an unparalleled success. This is regardless of the fact that the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India–the government’s own auditor–has raised serious questions on the veracity of SBM claims in at least two states. Many others, such as Accountability Initiative, which works to enhance accountability in governance, have been cautiously sceptical, too.

How can the truth behind such claims be judged? Accountable and responsive governance can only be ensured by reliable and comprehensive data.

Two strands
Although generally used as an umbrella term for government sanitation efforts, SBM actually comprises two divergent arms for rural and urban India, each with its own Management Information System (MIS). After their launch in October 2014, SBM-Gramin (SBM-G), or rural, quickly established itself as the role model while SBM-Urban (SBM-U) faced lower allocations, a smaller mandate, an uncertain departmental home, all of which contributed to its slow start.

This difference was reflected in their respective mechanisms for transparency. SBM-G created a comprehensive, dynamic dashboard, outfitted with a hyperactive ticker that counted toilets with such vigour that each reference to it needed a timestamp.

Other elements too were presented by SBM-G in great detail and from different analytical viewpoints. Not only was overall expenditure reported, it was broken by month, by component, and segregated by source of funds.

In contrast, SBM-U had little in terms of either design sophistication or administrative detail.

Over the last two years, both portals have undergone significant changes. Some changes were cosmetic, such as changing layout to highlight human-interest elements. Others seemed to be of importance although only in the esoteric world of policy-making. These included a steady accumulation of guidelines dealing with increasingly finer elements of the programme in SBM-G.

Disappearing toilets
SBM-U originally targeted the construction of 10.4 million individual household latrines (IHHL). States undertook a reassessment of toilet needs, and in February 2017, the overall IHHL target was reduced across 23 states and union territories (UTs) by 36% to 6.64 million. Andhra Pradesh, for instance, saw its target reduce by 52%. By this point, however, a few states had already claimed construction numbers based on initial targets.

As a result, between November 2016 and November 2017, 208,781 urban household toilets across seven states and UTs vanished from the MIS, Accountability Initiative found. While Andhra Pradesh accounted for more than half of these disappearances (131,530), sizeable differences were noted in other states, too. For instance, Uttar Pradesh lost close to 37,000 toilets, and Chandigarh had almost 13,000 fewer toilets in a year.

No explanation for this sudden revision was given. This issue becomes significant not only because of its pertinence to data quality and transparency but even more so given that at least Rs 6,000 is given as monetary incentive for toilet construction under the Urban Swachh Bharat Mission.

It was not just the number of household toilets that went down, which could plausibly, even if not convincingly, be attributed to miscounting. The number of community and public toilets (CTs and PTs) too reduced by 36,754 across five states during this same period, primarily in Tamil Nadu (32,780).

In the month between October and November 2017, the number of CT/PTs completed reduced by 13,640 across 10 states. Elsewhere, the mission seemed to be unsure of its own scope. Thus, while one page in the MIS reported that till December 2017, all 51,734 wards had achieved 100% door-to-door waste collection, another page in the same MIS reported that this proportion was 67% (55,913 out of 82,607).

Meanwhile, less than 37% of India’s waste is processed. Yet, only 29% of solid waste management (SWM) funds of Rs 7,366 crore had been released to states by January 2018. Major waste generators such as Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra had been released less than 5% of their SWM mission allocations by January 2018. As of September 2018, the SBM-U website reported no data on funds released for the current financial year.

Disappearing data
SBM-U never carried the same degree of detail as its rural counterpart. Its attempts at adding these details added confusion instead.

SBM-G had always made it a point to be transparent. The seemingly unimportant details it provided allowed for implementation to be unpacked and gaps to be identified. Over the last year, however, SBM-G has taken several steps in the opposite direction.

In January 2018, Accountability Initiative observed that while the indicators in the dashboard were intact, data for years prior to 2016-17 had been taken off. Between then and September 2018, most of these indicators have been removed from the public domain. Today, the much-celebrated dashboard tells a much shorter story, revealing more in what it omits.

While it is speculative to surmise the causes behind this retrenchment, it may be worthwhile to analyse which data have been removed and which retained.

What has been removed includes all data related to releases and expenditure of funds, conversion of insanitary toilets which foster manual scavenging, and several details of toilet construction. At present, the dashboard contains only four indicators, namely the toilet construction target achieved, the number of toilet photos uploaded (although not the actual photographs), the number of villages declared and verified open defecation-free, and the number of swachhagrahis (mission workers) engaged.

The story now narrated is familiar. That 94% of India has toilets, 470,000 of 600,000 villages have been declared ODF, and this has been done with the assistance of 496,000 swachhagrahis.

The data which were removed make the story more interesting. For instance, Accountability Initiative found that Rs 157 crore was spent on behaviour change efforts in 2014-15, which decreased to Rs 147 crore in 2015-16, and further to Rs 124 crore in 2016-17. During this same time, the pace of the mission’s achievements increased, with 40,030, 135,652 and 167,090 ODF declarations in successive years.

Effectively, this means SBM-G convinced and converted millions of families at a cost of Rs 33,382 per village in 2014-15, down to Rs 10,837 in 2015-16, and Rs 7,421 in 2016-17.

Independent evaluations such as by the CAG are essential to accountable governance, but they only play a supplementary role. The mainstay remains administrative data compiled on an ongoing basis. In order to illuminate, these data must address the entire implementation framework and include information on inputs and processes that led to the resulting outputs and outcomes. In the absence of regular and credible data on these processes, it is difficult to believe that either of these missions has succeeded, irrespective of what is being claimed.

(Deshpande is a Senior Research Associate at the Accountability Initiative – Centre for Policy Research.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

The post Swachh Bharat: A Tale Of Disappearing Toilets, Vanishing Data appeared first on SabrangIndia.

D P L Simon/Shutterstock.com

For people to invest in sanitation, they need to access the kinds of toilets and services that they want to use. One of the benefits of safe sanitation – and one that motivates many to invest in it – is better physical well-being. But messages about preventing disease are often insufficient to change behaviours.
One approach that combines behavioural change with improved access to sanitation products and services is sanitation marketing programmes, defined as:
 

The application of the best social and commercial marketing practices to change behaviour and to scale up the demand and supply for improved sanitation, particularly among the poor.

Toolkits and guides to develop and implement sanitation marketing have been published recently, as have region- and country-specific manuals produced by NGOs and government agencies. There is a growing community working in this area, evidenced by reports and discussions of projects across the globe.

An unsafe toilet next to an informal settlement in Fiji. Author’s own, Author provided
 

Reviewing past outcomes

In most such programmes, an external support agency conducts market research and then assists local entrepreneurs in developing a market in which to sell products and services. These might be toilet slabs and superstructures, pay-per-use toilets or pit emptying for latrine owners. The programmes normally include advertising campaigns to encourage uptake of safe sanitation.

This may seem like a sensible approach, but we and our colleagues suspected that some of these programmes use practices that adversely affect some people. In a new paper, we review 33 sanitation marketing programmes to understand what practices are used and the outcomes reported. Four of the 33 programmes reviewed reported the following adverse effects:
 

• The death or injury of someone falling into a badly constructed latrine pit;
• Social unrest where entrepreneurs were viewed as being subsidised and not passing on the benefits;
• Negative impacts on social cohesion due to conspicuous consumption, where customers are encouraged to purchase items so as to enhance their social status;
• The shock, shame and disgust of intended beneficiaries when practices criticised their personal sanitation behaviours.

We were particularly interested in conspicuous consumption and the criticism of personal sanitation behaviours, because these were common in the 33 cases we reviewed. Sixteen included practices which promoted conspicuous consumption and ten included practices which criticised individuals who did not use a safe toilet.

Use of status and shame

Conspicuous consumption occurs when improving status is emphasised in promoting products and services. In this case, that means attempting to convince potential buyers that investing in sanitation will enhance their standing compared to those around them. This is achieved, for example, through promoting toilets as a status symbol, and invoking peer pressure to increase sales. The idea of “Keeping up with the Joneses”, a worldwide phenomenon whereby people purchase goods and services so as to socially and financially keep up with, or outdo, their neighbours, is very much at work here.

Some sanitation marketing programmes set out to make people feel disgusted by their sanitation behaviour to encourage them to invest in the product or service on offer. One example in Indonesia portrayed a character who defecates in the open, Lik Telek (“Uncle Shit”), as a threat to his community. One of the programme’s posters portrayed Lik Telek being driven out of his village for not investing in sanitation, reading:
 

My village is clean and healthy. No stench, no flies, and no more Lik Telek. The whole village is more dignified.

Although many of the programmes we looked at which employed such tactics evaluated their impact in terms of whether toilets were purchased or used, few evaluated their impacts on well-being. But personal dignity is a human right that can be or is eroded by these practices. Reduced dignity is associated with poor physical and psychosocial well-being in the form of depression, social anxiety and alienation.

A banner in a Nepali village promoting safe sanitation, as open defecation is ‘only for cows’. Author’s own
 

Adverse effects

Safe sanitation protects and improves physical well-being for those who acquire and use it, and for those around them. One person using a toilet reduces the amount of excreta entering the environment, with benefits community-wide for those who use toilets and those who do not. It has been argued that temporary loss of dignity leading to the adoption of behaviours that are beneficial to both the individual and community is tolerable.

This argument is only sound so long as the remedy – safe sanitation – is universally achievable. But there are often disadvantaged people who are unable to invest in safe sanitation (for financial reasons, perhaps, or because they are physically unable to contribute to construction). Many sanitation marketing programmes do not provide subsidies or other pro-poor strategies which may assist because such practices are considered to “distort the market”. Individuals who do not acquire safe sanitation are particularly susceptible to reduced well-being, and they will be unable to remedy this.

During the design and implementation phases of sanitation marketing programmes, external support agencies need to understand sanitation marketing’s potential to reduce well-being. If practices that erode dignity are used, then such agencies must consider how the programme will eventually restore it.

During the design and implementation phases of sanitation marketing programmes, external support agencies need to understand sanitation marketing’s potential to reduce well-being. If practices that erode dignity are used, then such agencies must consider how the programme will eventually restore it.

Dani J Barrington, Lecturer in Water, Sanitation and Health, University of Leeds and Jamie Bartram, Director of the Water Institute, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post Toilet marketing campaigns in developing countries erode people’s dignity – this is not acceptable appeared first on SabrangIndia.