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When Narendra Modi, as prime minister of India, initiated his ‘Clean India’ (Swacch Bharat) campaign nobody would have conceived that it opened up murderous possibilities. The symbol being used for this campaign are Mahatma Gandhi's spectacles, a man who stood for non-violence, resolutely.
 
For that matter, a number of things were not imagined would actually take place after Narendra Modi's ascension to power – new reasons and tools to harass some people, some of which could become fatal.
 
For example, people would be beaten up, or could be even killed on the suspicion of having consumed beef. Then, if a Muslim boy and Hindu girl chose to marry, then in the name of ‘Love Jihad’, he (for sure) or sometimes, the couple may have to scurry for cover. The police have been especially empowered — if police suspected a man accompanying a woman of harassing her then Anti-Romeo squads were ready and waiting to jump upon him. Kashmiri students studying in other states of India could and have been beaten up at the slightest provocation, after being labelled anti-national, etc.
 
More serious intractable problems like famers' suicides, malnourishment of children, human trafficking of girls and women from Nepal and Bangladesh through India, people including children begging on major street crossings of national and state capitals, daily corruption at government offices, schools and hospitals have not been raised by the ever vigilante mobs allied to the current ruling dispensation.  To whip up a frenzied sense of ‘ultra-nationalism’, hunger, poverty and unemployment do not have potential; ‘Love Jihad’ and ‘anti-Muslim’ rhetoric is a far more potent weapon.
 
The manner in which Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) activist Zafar Khan was lynched to death in Pratapgarh, Rajasthan is not just shocking, the muted reaction against such increasing barbarism forces us to ask, what kind of society do we want to create?
 
On the morning of June 17, 2017 employees of Nagar Parishad of Pratapgarh were taking photographs of women belonging to the Mehtab Khan slum defecating in the open with the objective of ‘shaming them’. This deplorable act was part of government policy. Zafar Khan who was also a resident of this slum decided to protest. The accompanying Commissioner Ashok Jain instigated his Dalit sanitation employees to beat Zafar to death. A resurgent India under the new ruling dispensation has found a new reason to lynch people.
           
Do the women who defecate out in  the open enjoy doing so? When they don't have toilets at home where are they supposed to go to relieve themselves? If people don't have toilets who is supposed to build toilets for them? If anybody was to be punished for open defecation of women in Mehtab Shah slum it should have been the government officials whose responsibility it was to create these toilets in the first place. If the land on which the slum was built was government land and possibly personal toilets could not have been built on it then the government should have got a Sulabh toilet built there.
 
Let’s compare India's situation with her neighbours in South Asia: it becomes clear that successive governments in India have not given priority to construction to toilets. The figures are stark: In India, a mere 34% of the population has access to improved sanitation in 2010 compared to 92% in Sri Lanka, 64% in China, 56% in Bangladesh, 48% in Pakistan and 44% in Bhutan. Even Pakistan is better than India in this regard.
 
In India the caste system further prevents Dalits from using available toilets. For example, a number of Dalit domestic workers who do different chores like cleaning, cooking or baby sitting in mostly upper caste middle class or upper middle class households do not have permission to use the toilets inside these homes. They have to find some bush, tree or wall outside to relieve themselves.
 
It is the government officials who are responsible for the death of Zafar Khan. The Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindhia, who termed it as an unfortunate incident, should have resigned taking moral responsibility.
 
The Commissioner of the Nagar Parishad of Pratapgadh, Ashok Jain follows a religion, which lays special emphasis on non-violence. Jains are known to take care so that no micro-organism gets killed because of them. The Jain monks tie a piece of cloth around their mouth and nose for this reason. Jains don't eat onion and garlic to keep their passions under check. Yet Ashok Jain didn't seem to have any qualms to instigate ‘his men’ to get Zafar Khan murdered.
 
Narendra Modi'a cleanliness drive has, by now, completed three years. Citizens have been charged with a new cess to fund this campaign. Large amountsof public money was spent. The ground reality, however, doesn't seem to have changed. The cows are eating as much plastic on the roads as they were doing before and the amount of untreated sewage that flows into river Ganga in Varanasi remains the same as before. The Clean India campaign is a complete and abject failure. People (celebrities) got themselves photographed with brooms. But these photographs were not taken with members of the the Valmiki community, actually responsible for the demeaning job of daily cleaning our sewers after entering them. The credit for whatever cleanliness we see around us goes to the Valmiki community.
 
In all likelihood, more money was spent in publicising rather than actual cleaning in the Clean India campaign.
 
The policy of Narendra Modi has created a new category of discrimination in India. It mostly overlaps the rich-poor or caste-outcaste divide – the toileted and the toilet-less. By eliminating the toilet-less people India can claim to have increased the percentage of population with access to sanitation. It is a lie that statistics even, can tell.
 
 

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Comrade Zafar himself had submitted a memorandum to the Nagar Parishad some days back protesting against the campaign of public shaming and bullying of women for defecating in the open. In the memorandum he had demanded community toilets and repairing of the non-functional public latrines constructed under the Swacch Bharat campaign. He had also unsuccessfully sought to submit the memorandum to the DM who had refused to accept it.  

We demand that the Nagar Parishad Commissioner Ashok Jain and others named in the FIR lodged in Comrade Zafar's murder case be arrested and speedily punished. We demand that the Central Government and all State Governments officially declare public shaming and lynch mob tactics in the guise of Swacch Bharat campaign to be illegal and punish officials promoting the use of such tactics.

The drive to end open defecation cannot proceed on the basis of inflicting indignities on the poor and helpless people who have no access to private or public toilets. The present strategy of ODF campaign is giving rise to corruption, fake claims and public humiliation of deprived people. Governments must reverse this draconian strategy and unleash a positive campaign popularizing toilet use, with a focus on construction of toilets, assured availability of water, and proper arrangements for toilet-cleaning.

All over the country, sanitation workers are fighting for their dignity and rights against oppressive and inhuman working conditions. It is highly unfortunate that the Rajasthan Government, which denies sanitation workers their due rights, used them as fodder in the public shaming and lynching campaign on the pretext of Swacch Bharat.

We appeal to all the forces struggling against mob lynching, for women's rights and dignity, and for sanitation workers' rights, to unite in the struggle for justice for Comrade Zafar.         

We salute Comrade Zafar's lifetime of activism as a Central Executive Member of the All India Construction Workers' Federation and a member of the CPI(ML)'s Pratapgarh district committee. Comrade Zafar gave up his life to uphold and defend the dignity of women who were at the receiving end of the draconian Swacch Bharat campaign. 

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“Brother and Sisters, we are living in 21st century. Has it ever pained us that our mothers and sisters have to defecate in open? Whether dignity of women is not our collective responsibility?,” Narendra Modi said in his first Independence Day address as prime minister in 2014. “Can’t we just make arrangements for toilets for the dignity of our mothers and sisters?”  

 
Household toilet availability has improved from 41.93% in 2014 to 63.98% in 2017, and Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Kerala have achieved 100% open defecation-free (ODF) status, data from the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation show (as of May 22, 2017). However, almost all the progress reported by the ministry has been through no third-party verification, due to which the World Bank is holding off a $1.5 billion loan it had promised.
 
As the BJP government completes three years in office this week, IndiaSpend is analysing five of its key electoral promises–on employment, Swachh Bharat, roads, access to electricity and terrorism. In the second part today, we look at how the status of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
 
No independent monitoring
 
While Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin guidelines clearly envisage a yearly, country-wide, independent third-party assessment of the sanitation status of rural areas, there has been no independent monitoring so far.
 
The World Bank, which had promised a loan of $1.5 billion for Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin– the rural arm of the mission, has not released the first instalment which was due in July 2016 because India has not fulfilled the condition of conducting and announcing results of an independent verification survey, The Economic Times reported in January 2017.
 
It has rated the overall implementation progress of the programme as “moderately unsatisfactory.”
 
Construction spree
 
Since 2014, 40 million household latrines have been constructed. Between May 1 and May 21, 2017, 489,710 individual household latrines were constructed across the country, data accessed on May 22, 2017 from the Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin website show. That’s an average of nearly 25,000 toilets constructed per day.
 
Gram panchayats have self-declared 193,081 villages to be ODF, but 53.9% of these have not been verified, according to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, which is responsible for Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin, which accounts for 85% of Swachh Bharat Mission’s budget. (Data accessed on May 22, 2017).
 
Villages are considered ‘open defecation-free’ when no faeces are openly visible and every household and public/community institution uses safe technology to dispose of faeces in such a way that there is no contamination of surface soil, groundwater or surface water; excreta is inaccessible to flies or animals, with no manual handling of fresh excreta; and there are no odour and unsightly conditions.
 
Usually, an ‘ODF village’ declaration is made by the village or gram panchayat. The state government is supposed to carry out a first verification within three months, and a second verification around six months after the self-declaration.
 

Source: Ministry of Drinking Water & Sanitation; Data accessed on May 22, 2017
 
Latrine built is not equal to latrine used
 
As of 2016, 36.7% of rural households and 70.3% of urban households–48.4% of households overall–used improved sanitation facility, data from the National Family Health Survey 4, which was conducted between January 2015 and December 2016, show. A majority, 51.6%, did not.
 
Improved sanitation facility means having a system that separates human excreta from human contact which includes piped sewer system, septic tank, pit latrine, etc.
 
About 47% of those who defecated in the open said they did so because it was pleasant, convenient and comfortable, a 2014 survey of 3,200 households in five states with the highest rates of open defecation found. Among households that had built a latrine, 40% had at least one family member defecating in the open, the study conducted by the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, a non-profit research institution, found.
 
“Programmes must concentrate on behaviour change and promoting latrine use, rather than building latrines. Although building latrines could be part of a successful policy package, little will be accomplished by planning to build latrines that will go unused,” the authors noted.
 
Indians’ preference for open defecation has to do with the practice of untouchability and beliefs about purity, according to this 2017 study by the same institute.
 
Through quantitative and qualitative studies, they found people considered having and using pit latrines impure and polluting. “Open defecation, in contrast, is seen as promoting purity and strength, particularly by men, who typically decide how money is spent in rural households,” the study found.
 
Information, education and communication neglected
 
Since the focus of Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin is on behaviour change, the guidelines require that 8% of the funds be allocated for information, education and communication (IEC) activities.
 
During the 2016-17 financial year, 1% of the total expenditure had been made on IEC up to January 2017, according to Accountability Initiative’s budget brief. In contrast, 98% of the funds had been spent on construction of toilets in individual households.
 
Unreliable beneficiary data
 
Duplicate entries, ghost beneficiaries and missing households were the first stumbling block that researchers from the Accountability Initiative of the Centre for Policy Research faced while tracking beneficiaries of the government’s sanitation interventions across 7,500 households in 10 districts and five states in a December 2015 study.
 
Eventually, they studied 1,500 households that they could identify from the list. They found that a third of the households that government records showed as having achieved “sanitation status” actually had toilets, while 36% that had constructed toilets said these were unusable.
 
Of the households with a latrine which had at least one member of the family defecating in the open, the most common reasons cited were absence of water and the pit being too small.
 
Further, 40% of those who had applied for money from the government to build toilets reported not receiving it.
 
Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban Progress also slow
 
As many as 3.1 million (88%) household toilets have been built in urban areas, against a target of 3.5 million for 2017-18, according to the Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban website. Also, 115,786 (56%) community toilets have been built against a target of 204,000.
 
Yet, only 36.8% wards in urban areas reported a proper liquid-waste disposal system for community and public toilets, according to the 2016 Swachhta Status Report.
 
The focus of Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban is slowly shifting from construction of toilets to solid waste management, the Accountability Initiative’s January 2017 analysis of the programme’s budget noted.
 
Solid waste management includes segregating waste at source; collecting, transporting and storing waste; as well as processing, treating and finally disposing of it.
 
In 2015-16, 25% of the total money released was for solid waste management and 70% for toilet construction; in 2016-17, 45% of the money released was for solid waste management and 45% for toilet construction.
 
However, six states and union territories, including Gujarat, Assam and Kerala, are yet to receive any funds for solid waste management since the start of the programme, the study noted.
 
For the 2016-17 financial year, 23 states and union territories were yet to receive any funds for solid waste management till January 18, 2017, the analysis noted.
 
(Yadavar is principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)
 
This is the second of a five-part series tracking the status of the BJP government’s promises three years after it was sworn in. You can read the first part here.

Courtesy: India Spend

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A report called Swachhata Status Report ­ 2016 by ministry of drinking water and sanitation tabled before the Lok Sabha, showed that as of July 18, 2016, nearly 17 lakh households in rural Gujarat did not have toilets ­ which is almost 24.17% of houses in Gujarat according to Times of India.
 
Interestingly, Gujarat was one of the first states in India to declare its urban areas (180 cities and towns) open-defecation free last month. According to the news reports, on October 2 – on the 2nd anniversary of the Swachh Bharat Mission, union urban development minister Venkaiah Naidu complimented Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani saying, “Gujarat is the torchbearer and has set an example for others in swachhta (cleanliness).“
 
The report published by National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) also shows that 37% of villages from the state lack sewerage systems.
  
According to the TOI report, Centre's Census 2011 report says that out of the 1.22 crore households, including urban and rural areas in Gujarat, 47.25% do not have toilets.
 
The state, however, has claimed to have constructed 1.55 lakh toilets in 2013-14 and, 3.35 lakh in 2014-15, 9.22 lakh in 2015-16, and 2.08 lakh till July this year in 2016-17. Though no one questions why the construction of toilets dropped so drastically as against last year, on the face of it, both the Centre and the state government continue to praise each other about their achievements in taking the SBM forward, reported TOI.
 
Apart from lack of toilets, proper drainage or sewage systems are absent from 6,714 of the nearly 18,000 villages in Gujarat, claims the government report on swachhta, as the SBM promotes construction of soak-pit toilets in rural areas.
 
A social rights activist, Bharatsinh Jhala, who has been fighting for rights of homeless people, said that it is the government's duty to identify the people in need.
 
“Rather than making false propaganda in the name of Mahatma Gandhi, the Centre and the state government should sincerely provide better sanitation to the people of this country,” Jhala told TOI.
 
 

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