Rural India open defecation free? Not quite, shows NSO survey report

Around 71.3 per cent of rural households and 96.2 per cent of urban households had access to toilets during 2018, according to the survey

More than one-fourth of households in villages have no access to toilets, according to the latest official survey conducted by the National Statistical Office (NSO).

Around 71.3 per cent of rural households and 96.2 per cent of urban households had access to toilets during 2018, according to the NSO’s “Drinking Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Housing Condition in India” report, released on Saturday. The survey was conducted between July and December last year. The findings have come more than a month after Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared rural India to be open defecation-free (ODF).

According to the survey, a household has access to a toilet if a majority of its members has the facility of using it. This included toilets exclusively used by households, commonly used in the same building, or public-use toilets with or without payment.

The National Democratic Alliance government in 2014, by launching the Swachh Bharat Mission, had set a target of making rural areas open defecation-free by October 2 this year, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. A target was to “provide access to toilet facilities to all rural households in the country”.

“Today, rural India has declared itself ‘open defecation-free’. This is the strength and proof of success of the Swachh Bharat Mission. We are getting appreciated and awarded for providing toilets to over 660 million people in 60 months by building 110 million toilets in five years,” Modi said at a function in Gujarat on October 2 this year.

Two data sets presented in the survey report — household access to toilets and benefits received from government schemes on sanitation — were at the heart of a disagreement between the NSO and the government on the official survey results, leading to a six-month delay in the release of the report…Click Here

Tharoor-led Parliamentary panel decides to take up WhatsApp ‘spying’ issue

Headed by Shashi Tharoor, committee meet got off to a stormy start; the matter was put to vote

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT), headed by Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor, met on Wednesday and got off to a stormy start, with members being at odds over whether to take up the WhatsApp-Pegasus snooping issue.

Eventually, the matter was put to vote and the panel decided in favour of discussing the issue that involves snooping on 121 Indians. The meeting, which lasted over two and a half hours, took a political turn, with members taking sides, while the ruling alliance members were largely opposed to taking up the WhatsApp Spying issue. The voting on whether WhatsApp-Pegasus should be discussed ended in a tie. It was Tharoor’s vote in favour that ended the debate.

In May, WhatsApp became aware of NSO Group, an Israeli company, having used a coding glitch in the messaging app that let its customers spy on some people. The software developed by NSO Group for spying is called Pegasus. As many as 1,400 people were targeted by the spyware worldwide and 121 in India — most of them being activists and journalists.

On October 29, WhatsApp decided to sue NSO Group for misusing the messaging platform’s code to compromise user privacy. The issue has since taken a political turn, with the government asking WhatsApp to explain the breach of Indians’ privacy. The government has also come under some heat for not answering whether any of its agencies bought the Pegasus software….