Modi’s clean India claim pooh-poohed
India’s prime minister has insisted that his government has built enough lavatories to eradicate the need for Indians to defecate outside but campaigners say that up to 300 million people still lack basic sanitary facilities.
Narendra Modi said that his administration had delivered Mahatma Gandhi’s dream of a “clean India” — yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the independence campaigner’s birth. Organisers at events in Gujarat on the western coast marked the occasion by handing out 10,000 jars of treated human faeces.
After presiding over the building of millions of lavatories since coming to power in 2014, Mr Modi said the nation was “open-defecation free”. “Today the whole world is amazed by this,” he said. “The women of our country no longer have to wait for darkness. Innocent lives of young children are being saved.”
On taking office Mr Modi vowed to stamp out public defecation, installing a lavatory in each of India’s 650,000 villages. At the time, more than half of India’s 1.3 billion people did not have access to a lavatory, a fact that jarred with the country’s image as an emerging superpower.
Mr Modi vowed to end the need for men and women to squat by roadsides, fields, rivers and railways lines, yet it remains a common sight. Many of the new facilities have no water supply; caste and cultural barriers also deter many Indians from using them.
The government claimed in March that fewer than 50 million people relieved themselves outside, down from 550 million in 2014. “There is no way this claim is true,” Aashish Gupta, of the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, said after studying the use of lavatories across four states last year. “A substantial proportion of the population still does not have access to a toilet. Even if they do, many don’t use them. Toilets still carry a caste stigma.”
The jars of treated faeces handed out in Ahmedabad contained waste that had been dried, sieved and packed with seeds that would sprout upon watering.
Earlier Mr Modi paid his respects to Gandhi. “Take any problem the world faces, the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi offer solutions to those challenges,” Mr Modi said in Delhi.
Opposition supporters took to social media to say that Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindu militia that was a forerunner of Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Sonia Gandhi, the Congress party chairwoman, suggested that Gandhi’s soul “would have been pained by what’s been happening in India in the past few years”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/modis-clean-india-claim-pooh-poohed-7ptkfk7cc
