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Fund crunch hits toilet at home project
Highlights
Due to the inordinate delay in the disbursement of payment to the beneficiaries of the construction of Individual Household Latrines (IHHLs), the works of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) are getting affected in Medak district. Though sanctions have been given for 67,215 IHHLs, only 3,780 have been completed until now.
The efforts of district authorities to make Medak a defecation-free district may not fructify
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Sangareddy: Due to the inordinate delay in the disbursement of payment to the beneficiaries of the construction of Individual Household Latrines (IHHLs), the works of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) are getting affected in Medak district. Though sanctions have been given for 67,215 IHHLs, only 3,780 have been completed until now.
This raises a question whether the target for achieving Swachh Medak by October 2, 2019, the designated date for achieving open defecation-free Medak would be realised. As per its guidelines, IHHLs would be constructed with the combination of SBM and MGNREGA.
The IHHL may be constructed solely using SBM funds or by both SBM and MGNREGA. There is also an incentive of Rs 12,000 which would be given to a beneficiary who constructs his/her own IHHL. Rural Water Supply & Sanitation (RWS&S) department takes care of the SBM functioning.
According to sources, however, in several villages, even after the household completed the construction, they are not getting paid. M Srikanth, Sarpanch of Sikindlapur in Hathnura mandal says that the bills from the last year have not been paid until now and that this delay has been discouraging others from constructing IHHLs. He feels that Rs 12,000 incentive is not enough.
He hopes the government would agree to an arrangement where the funds are left with a government official and the gram panchayat jointly, so that when the gram panchayat gets the work done for several households at a time, the bills can be paid to them immediately.
When questioned about the delay in payment, A Vijay Prakash, SE, RWS&S, attributed it to the shortcomings of NREGS and Housing Departments’ functioning. He said payments were being done directly to the accounts of the beneficiaries ever since the department had taken up the project since April 1, 2015.
There are also many instances where if an applicant goes to apply for an IHHL, mysteriously there would already be an IHHL sanctioned against his/ her name, though there is no IHHL constructed in the past. These are called the ‘invisible toilets’. In Govindarajupalli of Hathnura mandal, there are about 110 IHHLs which were constructed 10 years ago under a government scheme named ‘Paniki Ahaara Pathakam’ translated as ‘Food for Work Scheme’.
In almost all the IHHLs, walls were erected and some have toilet pans installed in the ground. But no pits were dug, no rings were placed. Basically there is no outlet provided. So people stopped using it for toilet and have been using it for bath or have just abandoned them.
Now the villagers are taking up the issue in Gram Sabha of Gram Jyothi to collectively include all households’ requests in their resolution to construct IHHLs which were partially constructed. Lack of awareness among the communities on importance of toilet construction, cultural factors, poor coordination among NREGS and housing, poor capacities among grass-root level functionaries, high migration rate and scarcity of water are some of the things which are hampering the IHHL construction effort.
The only two constituencies which have fared well in IHHL constructions are Siddipet and Gajwel. The works in Narayankhed, Zaheerabad and Medak are still in poor condition. “If officials at village, mandal and district-level work hard, the goal of SBM can be achieved in no time,” opines M Chenna Reddy, Project Manager, MEDVAN, an organisation which works in Medak to achieve 100 per cent open defecation-free Medak.
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