Mehsana district administration has roped in the self-help groups (SHGs) to attain total eradication of open defecation. The district administration will motivate the public to join this sanitation drive in the district. First, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hometown Vadnagar in Mehsana district will be made open defecation-free (ODF) before March 15. Later, the district administration has planned to cover Unjha, Visnagar, Vijapur, Jotana, Bechraji talukas.

Under the joint signature of the district collector and the DDO, 187 villages have been adopted by class-1-2 officials of all cadres of the district and one village per an employee come under the district panchayat given for undertaking ODF activities.

Did You Know?

• Open defecation refers to the practice whereby people go out in fields, bushes, forests, open bodies of water, or other open spaces rather than using the toilet to defecate.
• The practice is rampant in India and the country is home to the world’s largest population of people who defecate in the open and excrete close to 65,000 tonnes of faeces into the environment each day.
• Around 595 million people, which is nearly half the population of India, defecate in the open.
• India accounts for 90 per cent of the people in South Asia and 59 per cent of the 1.1 billion people in the world who practise open defecation.
• Open defecation poses a serious threat to the health of children in India.
• The practice is the main reason India reports the highest number of diarrhoeal deaths among children under-five in the world.
• Every year, diarrhoea kills 188,000 children under five in India.

Source : UNICEF