38 per cent people in Uttar Karnataka don't have access to toilets

Building toilets in rural India was one of the major promises Prime Minister Narendra Modi made during his speech from the Red Fort ramparts in his first Independence Day address last year. The government has since moved with alacrity, claiming to have constructed around 80 lakh countryside toilets across India under Modi's ambitious Swachh Bharat mission. But a random assessment of the campaign by Mail Today shows that the ambitious move is plagued by crippling problems that threaten to offset the hopes among large swathes of population that seek hygienic living. 38 per cent people in Uttar Karnataka still don't have access to toilets and are forced excrete in open fields. The construction of toilets is a major focal area for the Swachh Bharat programme, which aims to make India "open defecationfree" by 2019. It aims at constructing 12 crore toilets in rural India by October 2019 at a projected cost of  Rs 1.96 lakh crore.   With inputs from Agencies