Fund crunch hits ISLs construction in Mahbubnagar

Mahbubnagar: Even though the district administration has been striving hard to make Mahbubnagar open defecation-free by taking up mass construction of Individual Sanitary Latrines (ISL) in rural areas, the district seems to be lagging in reaching the said target as programme is moving at a snail’s pace due to fund crunch.

At present, there are 2.11 lakh households in 474 Gram Panchayats, 595 villages and 1,339 habitations across the district. Of these, only 59,542 households have ISLs, which accounts to just 28.10 per cent, while the remaining 71.90 per cent households are yet to construct the latrines. According to official reports, the district was sanctioned 1,06,096 ISLs. Among them, 13,083 have been completed, while the remaining are under various stages of construction.

Already, 73,300 ISLs which are under construction have been photo tagged. Among them, 63,091 are uploaded online. An amount of Rs 3,767 lakh have already been spent so far. Another Rs 2,196 lakh are yet to be paid for 36,487 ISLs which are in pending. “We require another Rs 1,570 lakh for the construction of 26,194 ISLs in the district. The main reason for delay is because of fund crunch. If the required funds are released, we will complete all the ISLs in the targeted time,” informed Ronald Rose, District Collector Mahbubnagar.

It may be recalled the Centre has set a target of making all the districts in the country open defecation-free by December 2018. The District Collector expressed optimism that as already the construction of ISLs were being carried on a war footage in the district, if remaining funds were released on time, the district would be declared open defecation-free (ODF) before the targeted time.