New Delhi: The Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) recently celebrated the culmination of the Champaran centenary celebrations and a weeklong “Satyagraha se Swachhagraha” campaign run in Bihar from 3rd April onwards. On April 10, 2018, the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, addressed around 20,000 Swachhagrahis in Motihari, East Champaran district of Bihar.
In the run-up to this event, the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, in coordination with the Government of Bihar, worked to spread the message of Swachhata across the country by initiating the “Satyagraha se Swachhagraha” campaign from 3rd to 10th April. Around 10,000 Swachhagrahis from different parts of the country were invited to Bihar, where they worked with 10,000 Swachhagrahis from Bihar to “trigger” behaviour change throughout the 38 districts of the State and build momentum of the jan andolan further.
The impetus for this campaign began after the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, took a video conference with District Collectors from the four focus States of the Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin), namely, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Jammu and Kashmir. At this video conference, the Prime Minister emphasized that there could be no greater inspiration for completing this task, than the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. He urged for teams to be formed at the district level to accelerate progress, especially in the run-up to the 101st anniversary of Bapu’s Champaran Satyagraha.
Motivated by the Prime Minister’s address, the districts of the four States showed unprecedented progress in the days that followed. From March 14th to April 10th 2018, Bihar saw 10.2 lakh toilets being built across its 38 districts. Most of this activity was seen during the Satyagraha se Swachhagraha campaign (April 3rd to 10th, 2018), wherein the focused activity by 20,000 Swachhagrahis across the State lent greater momentum to the campaign.
It has been reported by some media outlets that such a rate of progress is impossible based on the calculation of a “per day” or “per minute” rate of toilet construction, working backwards from these figures. This is an incorrect interpretation of the data of the progress reported in Bihar. A twin pit toilet typically takes 3-4 days to construct, and this activity happened in parallel across approximately 34,000 villages in Bihar. Dividing the total toilets constructed in this period (14thMarch – 10th April, 2018) by the number of villages in Bihar, this works out to 1.1 toilet constructed per day per village, which is easily doable. To calculate a “per minute” rate of these toilets is therefore misleading, as it incorrectly assumes construction of all toilets in one village sequentially.
Some media outlets have raised questions on the toilets constructed during this period. The Bihar government is working on identifying any incomplete toilets after the pits were dug for them in the period of the campaign, and is focusing on completing them urgently. Any misrepresentation of data on part of local administration will be strictly dealt with by the Bihar Government.
