‘Govt far from meeting its target of building toilets’

The government is far from meeting its sanitation target of building a toilet for every household by 2019, a green body on Friday said and claimed its analysis shows that less than 8,000 toilets were constructed in 2015-16 against the target of over 2 lakhs in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency Varanasi.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised a toilet for every citizen of India by October 2, 2019, the year when the country will celebrate the 125th birth anniversary of (Mahatma) Gandhi. Our analysis says that is easier said than done in fact, the NDA government might find it easier to win the election than to fulfil this promise,” said Richard Mahapatra, managing editor of Down To Earth, a magazine run by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).

In this first-of-its-kind assessment, Down To Earth Hindi has analysed the toilet building performance over the last two years in constituencies of a number of central ministers, chief ministers and a few opposition leaders. “In 2015-16, a mere 7,327 toilets were built in Varanasi, Modi’s constituency against a target of 2,34,489 (till October 2019). At this rate, the target cannot be met before 2048,” it said.

Sunita Narain, director general of CSE said, “This analysis by Down To Earth Hindi is also to remind us that building toilets is only a small part of the movement towards access to sanitation for all.”