The Centre plans to free up 15,000 acres of land, currently used as dumping sites, and provide 24×7 water supply to households in 500 cities across India in the second phase of Swachh Bharat Mission and AMRUT, the Union housing and urban affairs ministry said.
The ministry launched the operational guidelines for the implementation of the second phase of two of the Modi government’s flagship initiatives launched by the prime minister on October 1.
“The second phase of both the missions is set to transform the country into a swachh country. We have increased our waste processing capacity from 17% (in 2014) to 70% now and plan to make it 100%. The country had become Open Defecation Free in 2019, based on third-party verification. Just one city (Purulia) in West Bengal is left that is not ODF free,” said Union housing and urban affairs minister Hardeep Singh Puri at the event.
Durga Shanker Mishra, secretary of the HUA ministry, said, “Of the 15,000 acres of land under dumpsites, we have freed up close to 3500 acres. In the second phase, we aim to free up the entire area and convert them into green zones.”
The AMRUT mission, Puri said, has been scaled up to cover all the cities. He said that just 60% of the country was covered under the first phase of the AMRUT mission. But in the second phase of the mission, the government has decided to cover all the cities.
Under AMRUT 2.0, the government aims to make cities’ water secure by providing a 24×7 water supply in 500 cities, giving incentives to all the local bodies for work towards providing tap connection to each household. The government aims to provide close to three crore tap connections. The mission aims to make 4700 towns/cities water secure, said an official.
