Top government functionaries believe that every household will get a toilet and will be open-defecation free before the 2019 elections, but have cautioned that changing the general mindset of the people still remains a challenge.
As per a Times of India report, the urban affairs department headed by Hardeep Singh Puri, has had a tough task to manage the huge quantum of daily garbage generated across urban areas. In fact, experts have said availability of toilets and their maintenance are key to their use, particularly public toilets in urban areas. In rural areas, on the other hand, the bigger challenge is to make the facility available to people.
He added that rural India had achieved only 39% sanitation coverage till October 2014 when the Swachh Bharat Mission was launched. "Over 5.9 crore toilets have been built and nearly 30 crore rural Indians have stopped defecating in the open since the launch of the mission. 290 districts in seven states of Sikkim, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Gujarat and Arunachal Pradesh have become open defecation free. We are expecting another 8-10 states to become ODF by March, taking the total to about 18-20. We expect 400 districts to be ODF by March," the official said.
With the primary objective to reduce open defecation through the construction of individual, cluster and community toilets, the mission aims to achieve an Open-Defecation Free (ODF) India by 2 October 2019 by constructing 12 million toilets in rural India, at a projected cost of Rs 1.96 lakh crore.
With one and a half years left, the mission has a long way to go, as data from the Swachhta Status Report from the National Sample Survey Office 2016 suggests. According to that report, 8.9% of urban India has to opt for open defecation, while 55.4% in rural India have to defecate in the open.
The number of individuals openly defecating in rural India has increased from the previous year. In the previous 2015 report, it was suggested by the Swachhta Status report that 52.1% of rural India still defecate in the open.
The Centre for its part, despite the increase in numbers, has been doing its bit to construct toilets across the country. As per data provided by the Swachh Bharat website, 70.3 lakh applications for individual toilets have been received. Of this, 25 lakh toilets have been completed, while work on 17 lakh toilets have commenced. Similarly, 80,554 community toilets have been completed, while work on 94,023 have commenced. When it comes to public toilets, the government says it has completed 23,760, while 36,246 are being completed.
To meet the 2019 deadline, the government, too, has started using innovative methods to ensure that people use toilets. Haryana has drones monitoring people who openly defecate, while the Madhya Pradesh government has passed a bill that says people who don't have a toilet at home won't be able to contest panchayat elections. Similarly, Chhattisgarh has a law that says that those without a toilet at home won't have access to public distribution ration.
More recently, the mission teamed up with Google to launch the toilet locator so that urinating in public will come to an end.
So far, 40 million household latrines have been constructed since 2014. "Betweeen May 1 and May 21, 2017, 4,89,710 individual household latrines were constructed across the country, as per data from the Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin website. The report adds that Gram Panchayats have self-declared 1,93,081 villages to be open defecation-free, but 53.9% of these have not been verified, according to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation.
In 2017, a parliamentary panel said that India will miss its target of becoming open defecation free by 2019 due to “insufficient allocation of funds” under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much publicised ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’
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 "A file photo of PM Narendra Modi inaugurating the Swachch Bharat Abhiyaan")
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