Nearly two years after urban India, apart from West Bengal, was declared open defecation-free (ODF) in December 2019, one district in that State had still not been given the ODF tag, Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Puri has said. However, he did not specify the name of the district.
On Wednesday, Mr. Puri launched the operational guidelines for Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U) 2.0 and AMRUT 2.0.
The Ministry said in a statement that the guidelines were “designed after multiple rounds of stakeholder consultations” and “under the overarching guiding principles that include equity and inclusiveness”. The second versions of the two missions were launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on October 1. While SBM-U 2.0 aims at making all cities “garbage free”, AMRUT 2.0 has the target of providing water tap connections in 4,700 statutory towns in the next five years.
