In a record of sorts, the Perambalur district administration has built 4,666 individual household toilets across the district within 48 hours under a mass campaign taken up under the Swachh Bharat Mission and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) earlier this week.
Although the district administration had targeted to build 6,000 household toilets under the campaign, the initiative fell short. However, construction of the rest of the toilets would be completed within the next few days, officials said. The exercise was taken up with an allocation of ₹7.20 crore. The campaign was executed on Monday and Tuesday.
About 2,000 masons and an equal number of construction workers were engaged in the construction. The identified masons were provided with necessary training and technical inputs by engineers and technical experts during the special training programmes held in all the four panchayat unions in the district.
“Construction of the toilets began simultaneously at the designated hour of 7 a.m. on Monday. Though the construction went on at a rapid pace, the masons could not complete some toilets within the stipulated time,” M.Rajaboopathi, District Project Coordinator, Swachh Bharat Mission said.
Collector K.Nandakumar supervised the exercise at Thirumanthurai along with officials.
The district administration had mobilised about 6.60 lakh cement blocks and 30,000 cement bags besides other necessary construction materials such as sand, doors and toilet pans.
The materials were kept ready and moved to the respective places before the exercise commenced on Monday. The ‘rural pans,’ have a steeper slope against the normal ones to reduce water requirement, officials said.
Mr.Rajaboopathi said the initiative has helped create awareness and many more rural people were coming forward to build toilets in their houses.
A nodal officer each was designated to supervise the construction of the toilets across the 121 village panchayats in the district. Each unit, costing about ₹12,000, was built with full government subsidy, according to T.Sridhar, Project Director, District Rural Development Agency.
While 800 toilets were built in Perambalur union, 1,100 in Veppanthattai, 1,500 in Alathur and 1,266 were completed in Veppur union during the 48-hour period.
Willing beneficiaries were selected from a list of households without toilets identified through a survey conducted earlier, said Mr.Sridhar.
The administration has planned to build 78,635 individual household toilets in the district and so far 46,166, including those built during the 48-hour mass campaign, have been constructed.
