BHUBANESWAR: Despite achieving an accelerated economic growth of 8.4 per cent, Odisha is still lagging behind in rural sanitation with 84.5 per cent of households having access to toilets against the national average of 96.5 per cent.
Odisha is the second worst performing State after Goa in construction of individual household latrines (IHHLs), the flagship programme of the Centre under Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). “Most of the States have achieved the status of 100 per cent IHHL coverage and only a few are yet to achieve their target. Goa has the lowest IHHL coverage followed by Odisha and Telangana,” stated the Economic Survey 2018-19, which was tabled in the Parliament by Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday.
The report said Goa, in spite of starting from a very high baseline, has shown a saturation of IHHL coverage to around 70 per cent only.“In Odisha, the coverage is yet to achieve 90 per cent level whereas the neighbouring States of Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh have shown significant improvements,” reads the survey.
While the major focus of SBM was to make villages open defecation free (ODF) by October 2, 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the ODF status in Odisha is 45.36 per cent. “Most of the States (29) have achieved the status of 100 per cent ODF coverage and only a few are yet to achieve their target. Goa has the lowest ODF coverage (5.84 per cent) followed by Odisha, Telangana (73.99 per cent) and Bihar (82.95 per cent),” the report said.
The survey has assessed that SBM, one of the largest cleanliness drives in the world, has brought in a remarkable transformation and traceable health benefits. It has helped reduce diarrhoea and malaria among children below five years, stillbirth and low birth weight (newborn with weight less than 2.5 kg). This effect is particularly pronounced in districts where IIHL coverage was lower in 2015.
The results of the study show that in 2014, before the start of SBM, there were an estimated 1.4 lakh deaths from diarrhoeal disease attributable to unsafe sanitation and about 39,000 of those deaths occurred in children younger than five years.“Since the start of the SBM, mortality from unsafe sanitation is estimated to have declined to about 50,000 deaths in 2017-2018,” the report added.
Report card