West Bengal sanitation project wins accolade from United Nations

Kolkata: West Bengal’s Nadia district had been awarded the United Nations Public Services Award 2015 for eliminating open defecation in the district within a span of two years.

Nadia district, located in south Bengal, with a population of 5.2 million had 35 per cent of its citizens defecating in the open till October 2013. The district administration, under a programme called Sabar Souchagar (toilet-for-all), built 356,000 toilets in the district. As a result, the number of people continuing with the practice dropped to mere 0.2 per cent. The district is poised to be [open] defecation-free by March next year.

The project toilet-for-all was launched in 2013, a year before Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched Swachh Bharat Avijan (clean-India-campaign) on October 2. coinciding with Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth centenary.

“Nadia is now a role model for India. We are planning to organise a national level meeting of district magistrates from all over India in Nadia to showcase this as a model project. This will inspire them in achieving the target of full sanitation,” said Asadur Rahman, state head of the UNICEF.

Former district magistrate of Nadia Dr P.B Salim who is being credited for achieving this feat in such a short time said making people use the toilet was the biggest challenge as even those who had access to toilets tended to defecate in the open as they were doing it for ages.

“It is the will of the people and mostly the children that have helped the district achieve this feet. Every Monday nearly one million children took the pledge not to defecate in the open. They in turn forced their parents not to defecate in the open which ensured that people were using the toilets,” said Salim.

“Even religious leaders helped to spread the message during gatherings. On Friday prayers in mosques and Sunday mass in churches, using toilets was one of the agendas,” the district magistrate added.

In previous programmes around the country, it has been noticed that in spite of government building toilets, very few used it and often the space was being used to store things, thereby defeating the very purpose of the toilet.

“The state has always being a harbinger of social change and once again we have proved that money cannot be an obstacle in achieving goals,” said chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

Each toilet costing Rs10,000 (Dh578), the state has been suffering from high-debt, could not allocate additional funds which could have cost the exchequer Rs620 billion was accumulated from various central government schemes including like ‘National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), ‘Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan’ (NBA) and National Rural Livelihood Mission (NRLM).

“This is a unique model that is being brought together through involvement of women, children and religious leaders to generate awareness, improve access to sanitary toilets, and bring substantial health improvement through improved sanitation,” said an official of the UN. “If replicated, it has the potential to eliminate the practice of open defecation all over the world.”