Cairn To Maintain 20k Toilets As Part Of ‘Swachch Bharat Abhiyan’
Cairn India now plans to scale up its initiatives by supplementing the Central Government’s Swachch Bharat Abhiyan, to focus on improving sanitation in Rajasthan by maintaining 20,000 toilets at household level.
Cairn India’s total contribution towards the project will be Rs. 8 crores and the implementation timeline has been planned for 18 months. The execution will start from January 2015 till August 2016. Rural Development Organization will engage in community mobilization, ICT activities and construction of toilets.
The government’s scheme to provide an incentive of Rs. 12,000 per toilet will be supplemented by Cairn India through viability gap funding of Rs. 4,000 per toilet.
In order to instill a sense of ownership among the community, a token amount of INR 600 per toilet will be collected from individual households. This can be monetary or in kind.
In the past, Cairn India has helped build 560 toilets in its Ravva block in Andhra Pradesh, to drive sanitation in the state. In Rajasthan, the company has promoted good sanitation state through programme interventions in 3 gram panchayats (Bhadkha, Beriwala Tala and Mundo ki Dhani) at Barmer, through construction of 1850 toilets at household level in a PPP mode. The overall community satisfaction for this program exceeds 80%, as per survey from a third party agency.
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean Indian Mission) is a national level campaign by the Government of India, covering 4041 statutory towns to clean the streets, roads and infrastructure of the country.
Launched on 2nd October 2014 by the Prime Minister of India, the campaign is India’s biggest ever cleanliness drive and 3 million government employees and schools and college students of India participated in this event. It has been carried forward since then with participation from all segments of the society from state governments to local authorities to government and private organizations and others.
According to the Census 2011 data, only 46.9 per cent of India’s 24.66 crore households have a latrine facility. Approx 49.2 per cent defecate in the open and do not have access to open toilets.
