Rural sanitation plan fails to take off

Villagers averse to paying for civic service

JARANWALA:

A rural sanitation programme launched by the Punjab government has failed within three months due to lack of adequate planning and implementation.

The ‘Ab Gaon Chamkain Gay’ programme had been launched in August, but the residents are not willing to the charges to the janitorial staff hired for the purpose, according to sources in the departments concerned.

The government had launched the cleanliness programme in 2,468 union councils across the province with the declared aim of empowering the community at the grassroots level.

The programme is mainly based on sanitation and solid waste management with improved governance regarding the services provided by the union councils.

The government had issued directives to the deputy commissioners of all the 37 districts of the province to charge every rural house, shop, petrol pump, marriage hall, vehicle service station and industrial unit Rs50 to Rs2,000 per month regularly and form management committees headed by assistant commissioners at the tehsil level village committees headed by the UC secretaries. The committees had to frame a mechanism to hire sanitary workers on daily wage, collect the sanitation fee the numberdar and patwari and deposit it in the bank account of each UC.

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The sources said the Faisalabad administration had identified 638,549 houses, 30,549 shops, 722 commercial and 805 industrial units in the district comprising the Chak Jhumra, Jaranwala, Tandlianwala, Samundri and Saddar tehsils.

The district administration held several meetings and workshops with the village heads to mobilise and motivate the communities. but to no avail as the majority of village Numberdars refused to implement the programme due to non-cooperation and unwillingness of the community to collect the sanitation fee. The sources said they had cited a trust deficit between the governmet and the people, local rivalries and divisions and a traditional attitude for the failure of the initiative.

The sources said the sanitation fee recovered till October 9 in the district had amounted to Rs962,350 against then estimated Rs15 million.

A retired director of the local government department, Chaudhry Shabbir Ahmad, told The Express Tribune that comprehensive spade work, including workshops for master trainers, community mobilisation and initial resource allocation were required to start a far-reaching project across all the union councils of Punjab.

He said there is a great difference between the conditions in the Lahore and Rajanpur districts and those taking decisions from the offices were oblivious to the ground realities.

The former official said prayer leaders, numberdars and patwaris of the revenue department could be the game changers but they had not been adequately engaged in the sanitation campaign, resulting in its abrupt failure.

He said it was necessary, first of all, to allocate funds from the district councils to kick-start the project, followed by involvement of the communities to create a sense of ownership for a sustainable implementation of the project. He said the governments did not have the capacity to bear the huge burden of funding the programme in the long run.

The sources said that following a lack of interest in collection of the fees by the rural communities, some UC secretaries had submitted concocted figures on the provincial dashboards.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 30^th, 2023.