Private firms build less than 1% of toilets in schools under Swachh Bharat Abhiyan

NEW DELHI: Private companies contributed less than 1% toilets constructed in schools under Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, PM Narendra Modi’s earnest appeal to India Inc notwithstanding.

Barely 10 private firms, along with industry lobbies Ficci and CII, heeded the PM’s call and helped build 3,466 toilets in 20 months under the Swachh Vidyalaya Abhiyan, or clean schools drive, under the larger mission, a survey has revealed.

In contrast, 64 state-run firms constructed about 1.42 lakh of the nearly 4.18 lakh total toilets built, most of them by states, as per Swachhta Status Report 2016 released by the National Sample Survey Office.

The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) had carried out the first survey since the initiation of the mission in 2014.

Tata Consultancy Services led the private sector by constructing 1,509 toilets, followed by Mahindra Group (1,171). Infosys Foundation (252) was a distant third, followed by IFIG (150), CII (138), Toyota Kirloskar Motor (69), ITC (60), Titan Company (42), Ficci (38), Microsoft India (22), Coca-Cola India (14) and Mercedes-Benz (1).

Modi had said in his Independence Day speech in 2014, “I call upon the corporate sector also to give priority to the provision of toilets in schools with your expenditure under corporate social responsibility.”
TCS and Bharti Foundation, the development arm of Bharti Enterprises, were the first two private players to earmark funds under CSR to build toilets. A Bharti Foundation spokesperson said the status report does not reflect the company’s contribution because it only includes statistics of the government’s Swachh Vidyalaya programme.

“We had initiated Satya Bharti Abhiyan in 2014 to improve sanitation facilities in rural areas. About 12,723 toilets have been constructed and handed over free of cost to individual households in Ludhiana. Separate toilets for girls have also been constructed in 14 government schools in rural Ludhiana,” the spokesperson said.

Bharti Foundation has adopted Ludhiana and is committed to improving sanitation conditions by constructing a toilet in every household in over 900 villages across the district by December 2016, benefiting 1 lakh individuals, the spokesperson said.

Mercedes-Benz India said in a statement to ET, “Mercedes-Benz conducts a gamut of social initiatives in the educational sector. The G.P.S. Valape and Dadachiwadi school project were allotted to Mercedes-Benz India through the web-link of Swachh Vidyalaya project. The company is also in the process of identifying local school projects that need support.”

Among state-run companies, Coal India built 51,115 toilets, more than twice as much as the second-biggest contributor NTPC (24,626), followed by REC (12,379), Power Finance Corporation (9,026) and ONGC (7,958).

The survey, conducted by NSSO in May and June 2015 to gauge the impact of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, reveals the extent of the challenge that the mission aims to address.

It reveals 52.1% of people in rural areas still defecate in the open while the figure for the urban population is 7.5%. In rural India, only 45.3% households have sanitary toilets, as per the report.