Click to play videoNew Delhi: In the upcoming budget to be presented on the March 16, Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation may see a hike in allocation that could be anything between 40 to 60 per cent, which means that the allocation could go up from approximately Rs 9500 crore to at least Rs 14,000 crore.
Speaking at the 2nd meeting of National Drinking Water and Sanitation Council, the minister for Drinking Water and Sanitation Jairam Ramesh said, "We must feel that investment in water supply and sanitation is a matter of urgent priority. It is as important as investing in defence. We can invest in missiles, aircrafts and tanks but if we don't have clean drinking water and sanitation, the population is not going to be healthy... We are becoming a wealthy population but not a healthy one."
The minister has already argued his case for enhanced allocation before the Planning Commission and says he has been assured by the finance minister. But, budget is perhaps just one of the issues on the agenda and the simplest to tackle. There are other more pressing issues. 839 blocks in India are over exploited when it comes to water and another 226 blocks are in the critical stage.
Sixty districts suffer from Japanese Encephalitis and Acute Encephalitis Syndrome. Parts of Assam, West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha suffer from arsenic and fluoride contamination. The many units set up during the 80s for treating contaminated water are almost dysfunctional.
Speaking at the meeting, Dr Indira Chakravarty emphasized how poor quality of drinking water could lead to anemia. The last round of National family Health Survey revealed anemia has increased over the years!
Joe Mediath from Gram Vikas pointed out the 'water – inequity', "In urban areas, a person is entitled to 80 liters of water while in rural areas it is just 40 liters!" Less than 15 per cent of households in rural areas have access to tap water. Rural women, with little access to food, spend a lot of their energy in just fetching water that may not be even clean.
Sixty per cent of all the open defecation in the world happens in India. Construction of dry latrines that depend on manual scavengers is a reality, despite being prohibited by law. Even in the heart of Lucknow, there are hundreds of dry latrines in the old part of the city.
Despite intense competition between the Congress and the BSP for the votes of the ati Dalits, manual scavenging is not an election issue. Vimla, who cleans dry toilets said," Mayawati spent a lot of money building statues of horses and elephants, she could have given us jobs instead"! As Ramesh pointed out, "Mahatma Gandhi was the last politician who talked about toilets".
Major restructuring is on the cards. In the revised sanitation programme, the focus will be on the gram panchayat and not on individual households. The 800,000 women volunteers in the National Rural Heath Mission could be given incentives to act as motivators for better sanitation facilities.
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme could be better integrated to meet goals on water and sanitation. But will it work? Poor quality of drinking water and poor sanitation leads to outbreak of diseases like Cholera, Malaria, Diarrhea, Japanese Encephalitis, which in turn lead to death and indebtedness. All these facts are well known and documented. Yet, more than sixty years after independence, we are still taking about clean drinking water.
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