Swachh Bharat: Tardy progress in construction of individual toilets

There has been a slow progress with regards to construction of individual toilets under the Swachh Bharat Mission, with a majority of the districts not even achieving 50 per cent of the targeted works for the fiscal, data from the Rural Development and Panchayat Raj department shows.

While the overall target for the year was to construct two lakh individual toilets, only 9,000 have been completed so far. 

In Kalaburagi and Dharwad, less than 10% of the works have been completed. While the department had set a target of 15,000 individual toilets for Kalaburagi, only 45 were completed. In Dharwad, of a target of 4,500 toilets, only 216 were completed, as per the data.

Kalaburagi, Dharwad, Vijayanagar, Gadag, Bidar and Belagavi are among the districts where the least progress has been achieved.

Save for Kolar, Udupi, Dakshina Kannada, Mandya and Kodagu, in the rest of the state less than 50% of the annual target has been met.

Speaking to DH, officials in the RDPR department said the problem was not with the construction of the individual toilets but with uploading the data.

“The Panchayat Development Officers (PDOs) are expected to upload photos of the constructed toilets onto the department’s web portal. However, in most of the cases, this has not been done. We have instructed the PDOs to ensure that the photos are uploaded at the earliest,” an official in the department said.

The department is setting the targets based on applications received from the public, the official added.

The department had set a target of 2 lakh toilets, of which work orders were issued for 40,382 and the target achieved was 9136, which is just 23% of the total target for the state.

According to a statement issued by Union Jal Shakti Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat earlier this year, 93.5 per cent of villages in Karnataka have achieved Open Defecation Free-Plus (ODF-Plus) status and the state is among the top performing states in the country. The ODF-plus status is given to states that have been able to sustain the ODF status and in general, have good solid and liquid waste management systems in place.