Swachh Bharat: Behavioural change of citizens a tough task ahead

The government has speeded up building individual latrines in rural and urban areas, which is a key component of NDA's flagship Swachh Bharat programme, though the guidelines were framed as late as December and January.

But the bigger challenges lie in changing people's mindset to keep public places clean and augmenting capacity of panchayats and civic bodies to collect and treat waste.

Between April 2014 and this March 17, over 43 lakh individual latrines have been built in villages. Now, with a policy in place and more funds coming in from the corporate sector and elsewhere, more progress is expected. But simply building latrines won't make villages clean. There must be a mechanism to treat the waste generated every day.

Every panchayat, however small, will get at least Rs 17 lakh in the next five years and this can be used to treat solid and liquid waste. But they need to adopt technology and own the facilities besides setting up an institutional mechanism to deal with the issue.

It's no different in cities. The government has set a target to build 1.04 crore individual latrines by October 2019. "Building toilets is one aspect. Behavioural change of citizens is a tougher task. Efforts, including media campaigns, are being undertaken, but these aren't enough.

We hope things will improve in 2-3 years as Swachh Bharat becomes a people's movement," an UD ministry official said.

Cities and towns face another major problem. They generate nearly 40,000 million litres of sewage per day ( MLD), only about 20% of this is treated. The rest flows into rivers and water bodies.

According to a Central Pollution Control Board study in 2014-15, of the 899 sewage treatment plants with installed capacity of 24,578 MLD, 605 are operational. Until there's a mechanism to process every litre of liquid waste, complete cleanliness will remain a distant dream.

Similarly, cities annually generate about 40 million tonnes of solid waste and most of it goes to landfill sites without being treated.