Vidya Balan, who received the Best Actress National Film Award for her role in 2011 Bollywood hit ‘The Dirty Picture’, will now play a role to alter the real dirty picture in India. Union Minister of Rural Development Jairam Ramesh has named the Bollywood actress as the brand ambassador in his campaign for improving sanitation [1].
According to India’s 2011 census, nearly half of population have no toilet at home, but more people own a mobile phone [2]. There are 2.1 million toilets in India which rely on manual scavengers to empty them [1].
The Minister hopes that Balan can help turn his campaign to end open defecation into a national obsession:
“it is going to be a very serious commitment on her part – she’s had a dirty picture in reel life, but this will be a clean picture in real life”. [1]
Vidya Balan has agreed to give support to Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan – the restructured version of the Total Sanitation Campaign – for two years [3].
Vidya Balan in clean picture! Cartoon by Satish Acharya on SantaBanta
The government is working on increasing the allocation for toilet construction from the current 3,500 Rupees (US$ 65) to 9,900 Rupees (US$ 183) per toilet, of which 5,400 Rupees (US$ 100) would come from the new Total Sanitation Campaign and the remaining 4,500 Rupees (US$ 83) from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). Minister Jairam Ramesh is requesting 360 billion Rupees (US$ 6.6 billion) for rural sanitation in India’s 12th five-year plan, which starts in 2012-2013. [4,5]
The Indian government’s ambition is to achieve total rural sanitation coverage by 2017. According to data available up to September 2011, 115.3 million rural households have access to toilets, leaving 40.8 million households without sanitation facilities. A parliamentary standing committee on rural development is sceptical whether all rural areas will be open defecation free by 2017. [6]
Jairam Ramesh is counting on the support of another Bollywood celebrity Shahrukh Khan to join the campaign to end open defecation [7]. Last year the “King of Bollywood” announced he would become a sanitation advocate at the Global Forum on Sanitation and Hygiene in Mumbai [8]. Earlier cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and actor/director Aamir Khan had lent their celebrity power to promote school sanitation and handwashing. Minister Ramesh’s dream is to have film director Shyam Benegal come up with a “toilet version” of his movie Manthan, which was about India 1970s rural development programme Operation Flood (White Revolution of India) to stimulate milk production [9].
[1] Rupashree Nanda, IBB-CNN, IBNLive, 05 May 2012
[2] Sanitation Updates, 16 Mar 2012
[3] PIB, 03 May 2012
[4] IANS, Economic Times, 25 Apr 2012
[5] Deccan Chronicle / India Sanitation Portal, 21 Apr 2012
[6] Elizabeth Roche, Livemint.com, 04 May 2012
[7] K. Balchand, The Hindu, 19 Apr 2012
[8] WSSCC, Sanitation Updates, 10 Oct 2011
[9] The Hindu, 19 Feb 2012
I wonder that how our actors get awards for doing such cheap and vulgar roles and how they are given the awards for such dirty work. Do our government also think that such ‘dirty’ roles as Vidhya had played in the picture will be a ‘role’ ‘model’ for people those don’t have toilets’! A shameful interpretation of a sensitive and neglected issue, and aiming work done without doing efforts and through such cheap means..I don’t buy the point of making of such ambassadors.