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States of Maharashtra and Jharkhand are scrambling to make urban areas Open-Defecation Free (ODF) ahead of the self-imposed October 2 deadline. The deadline coincides with the ongoing 'Swachhata hi Seva' campaign to mark three years of the Swachh Bharat mission.
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is aimed at keeping streets and infrastructure of the country towns and rural areas clean, eliminating open defecation by constructing individual, cluster and community toilets.
The government plans to achieve an Open-Defecation Free (ODF) India by October 2, 2019 (150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi), by constructing 12 million toilets in the country.
Construction cost of these toilets is estimated to be Rs 1.96 lakh crore.
The program also aims to establish an accountable mechanism to monitor use of those toilets.
The mission is sub-divided into two sections - Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Gramin), overseen by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation and Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Urban), overseen by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
Here's a quick status check on how the 'Clean India' mission has fared in three years:
Rural areas
Data presented by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation shows about 68.78 percent of rural households in India now have a toilet. The number of rural households with a toilet was around 38 percent as of October 2, 2014, when the Swachh Bharat Mission had started.
More than 4.91 crore household toilets have been constructed in rural areas since October 2014, the government claims. Out of them, 96 lakh were constructed in the 2017-2018 financial year.
According to government data, there are 2.47 lakh open defecation-free villages in the country as of September 2017, as compared to 47,300 villages in 2015-2016.
Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Haryana have been declared ODF (rural) since the project began. Sikkim was the only ODF state in the country in 2014.
Government data claims construction of more than 68 percent of the planned rural household toilets has been completed.
Urban areas
Data provided by the Ministry of Urban Development shows that out of the 1,309 urban local bodies in the country around 84 percent have attained the ODF status while 206 urban bodies are yet to do so.
Since 2014, Chandigarh, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh have attained 100 percent ODF status in urban areas.
Urban areas in states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Punjab have shown poor performance when it comes to tackling open defecation, the data shows.
While the rural areas of Haryana have been given ODF status, only 20 percent of the state's urban areas have achieved the same.
Additionally, 30 lakh individual toilets have been built in urban areas. 100 percent door-to-door waste collection has been achieved in at least 44,650 wards across the country.
To gauge cleanliness, the government conducts 'Swachh Sarvekshan' which evaluates cities based on criteria such as waste collection, sweeping and transportation, information, education and behaviour change, capacity building, ODF/toilets and processing and disposal of waste.
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