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India to become 'open defecation free' by 2012
Mar 27, 2006, 00:25, Reviewed by: Dr. Priya Saxena
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"Open defecation is slowly losing popularity in rural India, and the government is doing all efforts to end this for all by 2012,"
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By IANS,
Come 2012 and it will be rare to see people defecating in the open in India. So claims Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, who went on to say that the country was set to achieve 'open-defecation free' status under the government's Total Sanitation Programme (TSC).
"Open defecation is slowly losing popularity in rural India, and the government is doing all efforts to end this for all by 2012," Singh told IANS.
The TSC was started in 1999 by the rural development ministry to ensure sanitation facilities across the country.
"The growth in the use of toilets from 22 percent in 2001 to 38 percent of the population in 2006 (till February) is an encouraging sign. The government has raised the grant for construction of household toilets from Rs.625 to Rs.1,500.
"While the central government would now bear 70 percent of the expenditure as against 60 percent earlier, the rest will be shared by the state government and the family," he said, on the sidelines of a campaign on the need to wash hands.
The minister pointed out other issues related to defecation.
"In Haryana and Punjab people are not poor, what they lack is awareness. They have trucks, tractors and four-wheelers but no toilets - this is really surprising. However, states like Gujarat and Maharashtra are doing well," he said.
Singh said that plans were afoot to extend the TSC to all districts of India by the end of 2007-08 financial year.
Speaking about other sanitation measures taken by his ministry, he said a water surveillance campaign worth Rs.2.68 billion had been launched to train five people in every panchayat (village clusters) to monitor water quality in villages.
"Currently 468 blocks in India have water surveillance laboratories. Under the new campaign, efforts would be made to extend the facility to every block."
He said 216,000 village clusters were hit by the problem of poor quality water.
"We have reports of excessive fluoride, nitrate and presence of other chemicals in water. The authorities are working to provide quality water." 
- By Prashant K. Nanda, Indo-Asian News Service
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