UP's turnaround from laggard to best performer in building toilets

NEW DELHI: The government machinery in Uttar Pradesh is gearing up for a massive exercise of building 20 lakh toilets every month till this October 2 to achieve Open Defecation Free (ODF) status for the state a year ahead of a national deadline.

This would involve building nearly 74 lakh toilets in rural areas and about six lakh toilets in urban areas - the state is looking at executing the latter through Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode. If the state is able to execute this task, government officials say it will be a complete turn around journey for Uttar Pradesh - from lagging behind as among the two worst performing states which threatened to derail the Prime Minister's October 2019 national deadline, to becoming the top performer in last one year which could enable the country to turn ODF six months early by March 2019. "As the state with the biggest job at hand on toilet construction is now showing great speed, the national target is achievable ahead of time in 2019," a senior government official told ET.

Out of 2.69 lakh rural houses in UP, 1.94 Cr have been provided an individual toilet as on date while 3.69 lakh toilets have been built so far in urban areas of UP while another 1.46 lakh are under construction against a total target of 8.87 lakh toilets. Much of this job has been done in the last one year after a BJP government was sworn in Uttar Pradesh. UP was only at 47% toilet coverage under Swachh Bharat (Grameen) on April 30, 2017 compared to 37% coverage when the Swachh Bharat programme began on October 2, 2014 - which meant just a 10% progress in nearly two-and-a-half years. UP's toilet coverage presently stands at 74% - in a big surge in last one year with UP focussing on the toilets programme and the state becoming the best performing state on this count now. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said at the NITI Governing Council meeting chaired by PM on Monday that the state will construct 20 lakh toilets every month to complete the task by October 2, 2019.


The national toilet coverage stands at nearly 86% presently in rural areas.