Tura, April 24: Five districts of Garo hills today pledged to ensure an aggressive approach towards meeting the mandate of nirmal (clean) Meghalaya by 2017.
The deputy commissioners gave presentations at the two day consultative workshop on “Nirmal Meghalaya” highlighting the substantial gains, which have been made to increases access to improve sanitation.
Highlighting millennium development goal on improved sanitation facilities, deputy commissioner of West Garo Hills, Pravin Bakshi said, “The indigenous innovative knowledge has helped in construction of cost-effective sanitary toilets”. He also laid emphasis on behaviour change communication for imparting awareness among the rural masses to achieve the target for nirmal Meghalaya.
He used the popular tagline “A’chik Pride” for the campaign launched in West Garo Hills to propagate the message to do away with unsafe toilets. “Shame campaign speaks that open defecation is an indignity, it present a major threat to human health”, said Bakshi.
The campaign was launched on a mission mode in 2008-09 in Meghalaya and has seen an upward trend.
However, there is still a long way to go to achieve the target. Meghalaya seeks to achieve ‘Nirmal Meghalaya’ through access to safe sanitation and hygiene practices at all households, institutions and community level on a sustainable basis by the year 2017.
“People lacked access to adequate sanitation systems and were forced to defecate openly”, said Bakshi.
Deputy Commissioner of East Garo Hills, Vijay Mantri spoke at length on the bottlenecks in the implementation of the programme, which include road communication, responsible village level development committee, water accessibility and militancy.
“The cost of material for the construction goes up due to bottleneck in communication. The calculation of the ministry is not sufficient in many remote areas”, said Mantri.
Deputy Commissioner of South Garo Hills, Chinmoy Gotmore said, “We have funds for the programme but have not been able to utilize it to its optimum. We face challenges in terms of remote location, poor connectivity, inaccessible terrain, less working season and labour rate too high”.
To achieve the target under Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA), government has introduced an incentive programme, Nirmal Gram Puraskar (NGP).
NGP is awarded to those open defecation free villages, blocks and districts, which have become fully sanitised.
Out of over 6000 villages, 2,000 villages in Meghalaya have become “open defecation free” by 2013.(SP News)
