100 villages in Ludhiana to be open defecation free

Tuesday June 30, 2015 , 2 min Read

Under the ‘Swachh Bharat Mission’, 100 villages in Ludhiana will become ‘Open Defecation Free’ by October 2 this year, a senior official has said.

Under the first phase of this project, all rural households in 100 villages of the district would be covered and each household would be provided with toilets by the state government by October 2 this year, Ludhiana’s Additional Deputy Commissioner (Development) Supreet Singh Gulati said.

This project would be completed in a phased manner in 2017, he said. “In the first phase, 100 villages would be covered by October 2 and within next three years, all the villages of the district would be ODF,” Gulati added.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission) is a national campaign covering 4041 statutory towns, to clean the streets, roads and infrastructure of the country. According to Wikipedia,

Construction of individual sanitary toilets (mostly pit latrines) for households below the poverty line with subsidy (80%) where demand exists.
Conversion of dry latrines (pit latrines without a water seal) into low-cost sanitary latrines.
Construction of exclusive village sanitary complexes for women providing facilities for hand pumping, bathing, sanitation and washing on a selective basis where there is not adequate land or space within houses and where village panchayats are willing to maintain the facilities.
Setting up of sanitary marts.
Total sanitation of villages through the construction of drains, soakage pits, solid and liquid waste disposal.
Intensive campaign for awareness generation and health education to create a felt need for personal, household and environmental sanitation facilities.

With effect from 1 April 1999, the Government of India restructured the Comprehensive Rural Sanitation Programme and launched the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC). To give a fillip to the Total Sanitation Campaign, effective June 2003 the government launched an incentive scheme in the form of an award for total sanitation coverage, maintenance of a clean environment and open defecation-free panchayat villages, blocks and districts called Nirmal Gram Puraskar. Effective 1 April 2012, the TSC was renamed to Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA). On 2 October 2014 the campaign was relaunched as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.

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