Mahabubnagar and Adilabad stand out as the two districts in the Telangana State where achievement of sanitation and drinking water access to households is at its lowest, as revealed by a recent study conducted by Division of Child Studies, which is a joint initiative by the Centre for Economic and Social Studies and UNICEF.
At 33.23 per cent, Mahabubnagar has the lowest proportion of households which have drinking water facility on the premises. Adilabad follows at 35.24 per cent. When it comes to availability of toilets on the premises, the ratio plummets to 26 per cent and 29 per cent respectively in both the districts.
As any guess would have it, Hyderabad and Ranga Reddy districts have the highest percentage of houses with access to both the facilities within the premises. Hyderabad has 92.38 per cent houses having drinking water facility, while the same is 71.8 per cent in Ranga Reddy. In terms of sanitation, 98 per cent of city households have toilets inside the premises, while the figure for Ranga Reddy is 81 per cent.
Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao’s own constituency, Gajwel, fared not so well on both the counts, with only 40 per cent households having drinking water, and mere 46.73 per cent having toilets.
Alampur constituency represented by Congress legislator S.A. Sampath Kumar ranks the worst, with only 11.2 per cent households having access to drinking water, and 18.66 per cent households to toilets.
While the results are enumerated for each district, the actual study was conducted constituency-wise, listing out the status of each mandal in terms of both the facilities. The study is based on 2011 census.
Releasing the report here on Thursday, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly S. Madhusudhana Chary expressed anguish at the corresponding figures for his constituency Bhoopalpally, and promised to improve the status on both counts in a year.
He lamented the “despondent state of affairs” wherein the government does not have the data about its own infrastructure in the State. Blaming the previous governments for not providing surface water facility to Nalgonda district suffering from fluoride contamination of ground water, Mr. Madhusudhana Chary praised the current government and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao for boldly taking up the Telangana Drinking Water Project.
Advisor to the government on Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Hari Umakanth Rao said government departments had put in a lot of efforts in creation of assets, but failed to give attention to their operation and maintenance.
Salatheil Nalli, the UNICEF officer who spearheaded the study, said the study was conducted constituency-wise for the benefit of legislators to whom copies of the study results would be circulated. District-wise documents would be compiled soon for use by district collectors. He noted that only coordination between people’s representatives and Rural Water Supply Department would ensure improvement on both counts. The progress in each constituency would be analysed after a year, he said.
