r.i.c.e.

[caption id="attachment_1650" align="aligncenter" width="599"] A word cloud of the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan guidelines[/caption]

Continuing with our chart month, we post a word cloud of the programme implementation guidelines of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation's (MoDWS) Nirmal Bharat Abhityan. I thank Nikhil for converting the unreadable text in the PDF, which did not allow copying, into readable text using special softwares. The word cloud places the words alphabetically so words starting with the letter "a", such as "anganwadi" are towards the left, while those starting with later alphabets, such as s for "sanitation" are towards the right. The size of the words indicates its prominence in the guidelines. The image might be too small on your screen, so click here (or on the image) for a larger version.

Words like "sanitation", "NBA" are prominent in the NBA guidelines (obviously. That has to be!) It's interesting that "water" occurs more often in the text than either "latrine" or "toilet", which goes on to show the general focus of the MoDWS which spends about Rs. 9000 crore on water related programmes and Rs. 4000 crores on sanitation related programmes. But even in NBA guidelines, which has little to do with water directly?

Be that as it may, try finding the word "use" in these guidelines. You would have to really strain your eyes. Let's make it easy for you: Look at the right-most word, in the middle, just below the word "state" and "work", just above "water". Compare that with the words "construction", "funds", "financial" or "facilities", and you would realise that the major emphasis on the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan is to spend money to build toilets, without making sure that they are used and without encouraging people to use toilets.

This needs to change. This is precisely why in the recommended guidelines for the new Swacch Bharat Mission, we recommend a focus on USE.