OD – Outdoor Defecation Free Goa is a mirage as projected lately by Manohar Parrikar in the Assembly with a timeline of Dec 2018. Major offenders of OD are workers at construction sites going into the surroundings with bottles filled with water in their hands early in the morning. Surely they are not going out to water the plants! We have a major construction coming up behind GMC at the beginning of the Bambolim – Dona Paula Road, probably the GMC expansion, from where in the morning scores of workers stream out to the adjacent green areas.
Over the last month or so that the construction activity has been picking up, morning walkers are not able to walk on this stretch of road because of the stench coming through because of OD. The first initiative for OD free Goa should have been to make it mandatory for construction sites to have firstly toilets for their workers, better still Bio or chemical toilets. The exercise of distributing Bio-toilets to villages in Goa to meet the December deadline to become OD free is a spending exercise which is true for the entire Swaccha Bharat programme. Where the programme should have started from the basics to bring cleanliness in our surrounding by people awareness and education, the emphasis is to spend money which is being wasted.
Like on the toilets issue Sulabh International should have been brought in and installed simple toilets that they would run like it has been done in the slum areas of Mumbai in the concept of community toilets. Then progressively once people had got into the habit of using toilets then slowly the concept of Bio or chemical toilets could have been brought in. This methodology would have ensured that the toilet use habit is sustaining.
Nowadays you will find that even if the village home has a toilet the elders might still go out with a bucket in the morning by force of habit or stubbornness to persist with the habit. In these fancy purchases of Bio-toilets etc, or the OD – Outdoor Defecation free Goa, you will find these will not work within a year of inauguration like we have seen in our traffic signals, CCTV, etc. Thus someone is clearly lining their pockets with these purchases or favours are being made to particular suppliers.
Again the Swaccha Bharat programme was launched for publicity by VIPs from the PM to Governors sweeping the roads. But these eminent people forgot to put in place a system for someone to do it the next day so the road remains unswept since that day when the VIP used the broom on it. The broom is also lying forlorn in the gutter forgotten because nobody wants to buy it on auction even though NaMo touched it!
The other thing is that if you want a Swaccha Bharat make the streets and surroundings of India animal free, like dogs, cattle, etc. These should be removed since with their pooh (shit), they contribute more to the dirty roads and surroundings than anything else.
