India now believes that it is an aid-giving country, rather than a recipient - despite being home to the largest number of poor and undernourished people in the world - its progress on one focus of the MDGs, water and sanitation, is painfully slow. The UN's target is to halve those in the world without access to clean water (1.2 billion) and sanitation (2.4 billion) by 2015. And India's progress towards this standard is both slow and sketchy. Particularly regards water, the country's official figures are misleading, because a village is termed 'covered' by this programme if a single hand pump has been installed in village, never mind that even this is dry most of the time. What the programme is providing is not water, but the infrastructure for it!
Similarly, there is a huge gap between the number of family toilets built and those which continue to function, due to the shortage of water and other factors. Experts in this sector regale each other with stories of how toilets built in poor areas throughout the world have been put to alternative uses, often as the best-built, only tiled structure in village homes. In many Indian villages, they have been used to tether cattle. A report brought out last year by WaterAid India, a Delhi-heaquartered British-affiliated NGO concluded that 'sanitation for all' still has a long way to go.
The reasons, according to WaterAid, are that despite huge outlays, there were institutional challenges. These included "addressing leakages in official spending, monitoring of progress and creating linkages between different agencies". Typically, sanitation schemes have relied on heavy subsidies - a supply-driven approach. This has been criticised, most strongly by the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Programme, because it does not take into account people's real needs. The Bank, which emphasised its alternative strategy at a South Asian sanitation conference in Islamabad late last year, sees the problem in terms of making people demand sanitation - for convenience, dignity, privacy, hygiene and a host of related factors.
The central government too has veered round to this approach and introduced the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) in 1999. Under it, initiatives are demand-driven and community-led. The coverage has as a consequence spread rapidly, and is now in all but a dozen districts in the country. Panchayati raj institutions play a pivotal role in the programme and the costs of subsidies are now shared between the centre and state governments and beneficiaries. There is also an even more effective Swajaldhara programme for water and sanitation which, as its name suggests, relies on self-help, especially involving women.Even so, among poor countries in Asia, India figures only marginally better than Cambodia at the very bottom of the pile in that less than a fifth of its rural population has access to sanitation, while 40 per cent of rural Bangladeshis and 45 per cent of Pakistanis do. A UNICEF study in 2004 confirmed that there is a huge gap between toilet construction and use among the rural poor in the country. Last year, a UN Millennium Development Goal report pointed out that there is "very low coverage" in South Asia. Out of 28 Indian states, only seven had launched Swajaldhara and only one had completed a project - Tamilnadu. Funds do not appear to be the problem: more the lack of will. Under TSC, each district was entitled to Rs.20 crores. A third was disbursed when the project report was properly submitted. Not a single state had qualified for the remaining two-thirds yet.
टिप्पणियाँ