In India, though considerable investments are made through the Total Sanitation Campaign (flagship program of Govt of India) the ground realities of sanitation facilities are very poor and alarmingly dangerous for human health.
Published on: 26/01/2012
In India, though considerable investments are made through the Total Sanitation Campaign (flagship program of Govt of India) the ground realities of sanitation facilities are very poor and alarmingly dangerous for human health. The capital investments made on sanitation are often going to waste, as the toilets constructed are not being used. The innovation of Nirmal Gram Puraskar (NGP) award increases the use of toilets but the indications are that it does not guarantee sustained open-defecation free status. Variation between the sanitation practices of the poor and rich are significant and the subsidies provided by the Government do not even meet 30% of the total investment required to construct the toilet.
Based on analysis of household and village-level data from over a hundred villages and more than five thousand households, this paper i) analyses public and private expenditure using the life cycle costing approach and ii) gives particular attention to identifying factors and drivers that lead to differential access to and use of sanitation services by the poor and non-poor.
The main conclusions from this study are that the Total Sanitation Campaign and Nirmal Gram Puraskar award system need improvement in the following aspects: i) increasing the scale and duration of expenditure on IEC to carry out more activities over a longer period with the aim of achieving sustained behaviour change; ii) implementing a stepped award system that rewards sustained achievement of sanitation services; iii) putting in place safeguards for poor people with regard to taking loans for constructing latrines; iv) developing a payment transfer system that treats villages as a unit for fund transfers rather than targeting individual households for subsidies, and v) Increased emphasis on achievement of behavioural change by dovetailing social responsibility for construction and monitoring of toilets, solid and liquid waste disposal at village level.
