Swachh Bharat cess capital should be used correctly: Kidwai

A: Both really. There is a lot of money that is required. Mission to build toilets has been well underway. However there is a lot of money required to also ensure that behaviour change happens and that the maintenance of these toilets and operations of these toilets continues, particular in the school programmes where these toilets have gone in. I do believe that not enough provision has been made to ensure that we have funding for all of this. If the cess is a cess on say carbon, so the cess might come on petrol and diesel, things which you want to charge people a little more for because they pollute the environment and then use that money for things that are critical to clean the environment namely sanitation, then in theory this works.

My concern is that there should be transparency because we have seen that where the money moved into the Swacch Bharat Kosh, what happened with the kosh is that that money is being deployed for sanitation and I believe some Rs 58 crore has been given to some 12 NGOs that applied through a due process that was followed. So, we need to make sure that the money is spent.

Q: Let me pick up on those points because there is already a bunch of cesses in this system. You then have the CSR money, which is also floating around. It has been that two percent mandatory CSR cess if I could call it that. That has come into effect. As you were pointing out is it not the case that you actually need the money to be spent efficiently and by imposing another cess the government in a way seems to be absolving itself of responsibilities or at least that is what it seems to suggest?

A: The fact is that money is needed. There are many municipalities that are bankrupt, we need a lot of the back end of the system is that goals beyond the toilet building, into the treatment of sewage that is requiring funding. So, I do think raising the money particularly when it happens as cess on activities which you would like people to use their cars less, you would like pollution to drop. If these are ways of checking that and they are going into providing us a cleaner environment because government itself is unable to because of the funding particular at the state government level then there is merit to raising some of these money but it really is back to spending this money which your question is absolutely right that A; there isn't transparency on where this money is going and B; the money is not being spent completely for what it is raised then there is an issue. But if the two can go hand in hand entirely and it is not difficult to find projects where the money should be spent or indeed impose a cess I would be in favour of the cess alongside insuring better use of the funds that get raised and the CSR money goes into the Kosh and the Kosh itself has reasonable transparency because it is on a website. You know where the money is going. It just needs to go faster. The mechanism set up is there are a bunch of secretaries across ministries who dispose on it. So, maybe it needs to become a little more practical and maybe have people who have a little bit more time to sit often and dispense the funding faster when it comes in. So, not a bad idea provided we can get the funds deployed.

Q: Beyond funding what is it that you would like to see? There is a lot of talk around building toilets but let us look at viable solutions for India, what about waste management, shouldn't the government be looking at the entire spectrum and have we sort of become toilet obsessed?

A: This is one of the reasons we got the India sanitation coalition launched. The idea really was that the country is at a tipping point where the government has embarked on this huge toilet building programme and it is phenomenal because you need the infrastructure in place. What we need is for all of civil society and all the players who work in sanitation or indeed are concerned about the cleanliness of our environment and the health of our people to deliver on ensuring that the same toilets are utilised properly, that the communication of why they should be used, not used for storage as often happens but used as toilets needs to happen.

Then if you ask on waste management, it would be the most expensive experiment in the world if all we did was funnel all the shit into toilets only to push it back out into the fields and into our rivers. What is needed is once it is funnelled through the toilet, to treat it and make sure that it is sanitised in a way that it can either be used as fertiliser or energy but certainly not to pollute the very things it was polluting before. That backend is where government has to play a very big role because that is not where the private sector plays a role as a contractor but everywhere in the world it is the government at best in a PPP model that waste treatment, sewage treatment kicks in and I do believe we have under spent them. Many cities including Delhi have as low as 30 percent only sewage treatment. We need to be at levels of at least 90 percent of our sewage being treated. And that objective is the one that has to be an area of focus for us as a country, sewage treatment.