Published : 13 Jun 2013, 12:22 PM
The ruling Awami League has not fulfilled its election pledge regarding water and sanitation, international charity Wateraid and a research group, Human Development Research Centre (HDRC), say.
They made this observation on Thursday after analysing the budgetary allocations for this ‘vital’ public health sector and the progress made in ensuring drinking water and sanitation for all, something the party had promised.
Awami League, which came to power in 2009, had promised in its pre-election manifesto drinking water for all by 2011 and sanitation by 2013.
The latest statistics prepared jointly by the World Health Organisation and Unicef show 83 per cent of the people have access to drinking water, while 55 per cent have ‘hygienic toilet’ in Bangladesh. They also found 27 per cent people share toilets in their community.
Malnutrition and diarrhoea are common in Bangladesh.
“The budget has been cut again,” said economist Abul Barkat, who felt the government lacked ‘commitment’ to improving water and sanitation conditions, despite its election promise.
He said in the proposed 2013-2014 budget the allocation in the water and sanitation sector had been slashed by about Tk 1500 million.
He said the allocation was ‘insufficient’ and pointed to a ‘huge’ urban-rural disparity.
“The distribution (of the budget) is heavily urban-biased,” he said, stressing that 83 per cent of it would go to urban areas.
Wateraid Bangladesh representative Dr Khairul Islam also found lack of commitment in the water and sanitation sector.
He said the Finance minister’s last five budget speeches on water and sanitation were ‘ambiguous’.
“In his first budget speech for 2009-10 he said about 88 per cent people were using sanitary toilets. We will try to reach 100 per cent by the next year.
“After two years, in his 2011-12 budget speech, he said we are committed to ensuring sanitation for all by 2013 and said currently 90.6 per cent of the people were using sanitary toilets.”
Islam said they understood that in the two years the government had made a progress of 2.6 per cent and “if this trend continues, it’ll take seven years to reach 100 per cent”.
“But the minister in his 2012-13 budget speech said the sanitation rate was 91 per cent, 0.4 percentage points more than his earlier speech.
“But in this proposed budget he made no mention of the sanitation-for-all promise and, surprisingly, said we could bring 90 per cent of the people under the sanitation coverage. That means the coverage has come down by 1 per cent.”
He said the coverage rose from 88 per cent to 90 per cent in four years, indicating a 0.5 per cent increase per year. “If this trend continues, it will take 20 more years to reach everyone in Bangladesh”.
The two organisations urged the government to keep its promise and allocate more funds for this sector in Bangladesh, where diarrhoea was a leading cause of childhood deaths.
They also demanded need-based allocation to ensure that inaccessible and low lying areas were not missed out.