Berhampur, Youth Club members in slums like Raghupati Nagar, Lanjipalli Goudabandha, Dhimira Street and Phulasundari Street meet and submitted a memorandum to the district collector at the joint grievance to immediately provision toilets to the households under the Swachha Bharata Mission-Urban.
They highlighted the delay in approval for the sanction of toilets under SBM-U by BeMC, which were submitted since last 4-6 months. No action has been taken to speed up the process to construct toilets under this scheme.
As per the city sanitation plan, 2011 prepared by BeMC nearly 59.9% people in slums in Berhampur city defecate in open areas due to lack of household and community toilets. As a result this creates an unhealthy and unhygienic situation in slums and reasons for many diseases for the children, adolescent and women in slums. There are only 24 numbers of public toilets and 10 of them are dysfunctional due to poor maintenance and unhygienic condition. Among the 117541 slums population only 3% households use community toilets. There is immense delay in construction of new public toilets make the city dwellers to defecate in open areas.
Young people in slums come forward to creating public awareness and engage with the city government officials to resolve the issues and to make slums open defecation free (ODF). District collector assured to resolve these issues within seven days.
