New Delhi : Kerala has as many as 491 Model ODF Plus villages, 12 Aspiring and 17 Rising making a total of 522 ODF Plus villages from a total of 1578 villages (941 Gram Panchayats) across the 14 districts of the State. To accelerate the process of declaring more villages as ODF Plus, the State Administration is carrying out various capacity building exercises to train officials and boost implementation of activities across all ODF Plus verticals.
An ODF Plus village is one which sustains its Open Defecation Free (ODF) status, ensures solid and liquid waste management and is visually clean.
According to official data, 780 villages in the State have community sanitary complexes with 243 new ones in the process of construction; while 622 villages have been saturated with solid waste management and 510 villages saturated with liquid waste management.
As far as plastic waste management is concerned, as many as 115 Blocks have plastic waste management units (55 units in Block Panchayats, 60 units in Gram Panchayats and 904 material collection facilities in 904 GPs with 32 others in the process of being set up). Further there are 42 Gobardhan projects across the 14 districts.
While 2 districts have faecal sludge management systems, Muttathara in Trivandrum district and Brahmapuram in Ernakulam district have been identified for co-treatment of faecal sludge. The State also has 149 liquid waste management projects under which soak pits are being constructed.
Capacity strengthening: Having formed and oriented a 70-member State level resource team, the State has also created a state level technical resource team, also conducting a training of trainers’ programme on SBM-G with special focus on liquid waste management.
In addition, it has selected 5 technical resource persons and 5 general resource persons from each district and trained two of them in the SBM-G components. Further, 28 handpicked LSGI (local self-government institutions engineers) with Environmental Engineering background, have been trained along with Technical Consultants of solid waste management as Master trainers.
With 3 State level master trainers orientation programme already held, the state has outlined its strategy for orientation of other functionaries at all levels, including for master trainers, GP presidents, with monitoring mechanisms clearly defined.
The criteria for declaring a village as ODF Plus depends on interventions on the various verticals of solid and liquid waste management. DDWS had introduced intermediate stages in the process of declaring a village as ODF Plus as under:
ODF Plus – Aspiring: A village in which all households have access to a functional toilet facility; all schools/anganwadi centres/panchayat ghars have access to a functional toilet with separate toilets for men and women; and the village has arrangements for solid waste management or liquid waste management.
ODF – Rising: A village in which all households have access to a functional toilet facility; all schools/anganwadi centres/panchayat ghars have access to a functional toilet with separate toilets for men and women; and the village has arrangements for solid waste management and liquid waste management.
ODF – Model: A village in which all households have access to a functional toilet facility; all schools/anganwadi centres/panchayat ghars have access to a functional toilet with separate toilets for men and women; all public spaces in the village have minimal litter, minimal stagnant wastewater and no plastic waste dump in public places; the village has arrangements for solid waste management and liquid waste management; and the village should have ODF Plus IEC messages prominently displayed through wall paintings and billboards.
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