World Bank to invest $1 bn in Swacch Bharat campaign

A: Swachh Bharat is truly very important because one of the three factors that we look at in terms of opportunities is do people live in an environment of adequate sanitation and it is an incredibly important thing to determine what the likely outcome of the life of the child can there be whether girl or a boy, girl even more important than boy. So, we are very keen in supporting.In fact we are working with the government on this specific programme where we would support the Swachh Bharat programme in the low income states in India, well known group of states where the challenge is the biggest, using our existing programme in rural water supply but shifting focus to rural sanitation, rolling it out to all these states and helping in particular with monetary evaluation, making sure that we don’t just built toilets but make sure that we build incentives for people to use toilets and that the system actually is results based.We are considering considerable large sums of financing for that. The government has asked us at the highest level to prepare this with speed. So, we have teams here working flat out day and night to support.Q: Is there an amount that you can commit? What kind of corpus can we expect from the World Bank?A: Given the fact that we haven’t fully completed our discussion, I wouldn’t want to commit to an amount. However it will be no less than USD 1 billion. So, it is a significant amount.Governments own money is significantly more. So, we would try to use our money to help make the government's programme really result focus and focus on supporting implementation and behavioural change. It is a significant money but the governments own money will definitely be more.