Business Standard: New Delhi: Thursday,
December 08, 2016.
Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India
Mission) is not just funded by taxpayers but also by voluntary donations to a
special fund set up for the purpose. Information obtained by Business Standard
under the Right To Information (RTI) Act shows that from September 2014 till
October this year, the Swachh Bharat Kosh (SBK) received almost Rs 455 crore in
donations.
The single
largest donation of Rs 100 crore came from Kerala-based spiritual organisation
called Mata Amritanandamayi Math. The organisation based in Kollam in Kerala
made this donation on September 15, 2015. Interestingly, just a few months
before the Rs 100 crore donation was made, Mata Amritanandamayi called ‘Amma’
(Mother) by her followers, had met PM Modi at his residence.
Reports from
the time suggest that she had expressed her intentions to contribute to the
government’s Namami Ganga project aimed at cleaning the polluted Ganga river.
Mata Amritanandamayi has many high profile followers including sportsmen,
politicians, businessmen and actors across the world. In September 2016, a year
after the donation was made, the Indian prime minister had specially flown to
Kerala to attend the spiritual leader’s birthday celebrations.
Information
shared by the Finance Ministry shows that the funds donated by the spiritual
organisation was deployed in states through which the Ganga flows. The funds
were specifically deployed for “constructing toilets for poor and downtrodden
in villages surrounding the Ganga river.”
The biggest
beneficiary was the state of West Bengal which received Rs 83 crore from the
spiritual organisation’s donation. Funds were sanctioned to West Bengal by the
Ministry of Human Resource Development’s (HRD) department of school education
and literacy in addition to the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation.
The HRD
ministry had sanctioned Rs 36 crore on January 12, 2016 to West Bengal from the
donation to repair or reconstruct dysfunctional toilets in government schools.
The Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation had sanctioned Rs 47 crore on
January 21, 2016 to the state for building or repairing over 39000 toilets in
households across West Bengal. These funds were to be only used in those towns
and villages in West Bengal that were situated around the Ganga.
While these
funds were sanctioned and released, West Bengal hasn’t provided utilisation
certificates as of date to the central government.
Other states
that received funds out of the donation were Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttarakhand.
Jharkhand received Rs 1.64 crore for constructing close to 300 toilets in
government schools. Bihar received Rs 11 crore for the purpose.
The Himalayan
state of Uttarakhand from where the Ganga supposedly originates received almost
Rs 3 crore for building over 2400 toilets for rural households.
The Rs 100
crore donation by Mata Amritanandamayi to the Clean India Fund is much higher
than other corporates who donated under their Corporate Social Responsibility
(CSR) activities.
Information
obtained under RTI shows that one of the largest donors after the Mata
Amritanandamayi Math is engineering behemoth Larsen and Toubro (L&T).
Unlike the spiritual organisation’s single donation, L&T made multiple
donations totalling almost Rs 61 crore from March to July 2015. The donations by L&T also coincided with
major milestones for the Rs 16,000 crore engineering giant.
The Rs 30
crore donation made in July came just a few days after L&T flagged India’s
first nuclear steam generator for the Kakrapar nuclear power plant in Gujarat.
Meanwhile the
Rs 30 crore donation made in June came just a few days before it bagged a Rs
2715 crore contract from ONGC for its offshore Bassein development project.
L&T’s defence arm had also bagged a Rs 468 crore contract from the Ministry
of Defence for building a floating dock for the Indian Navy in June 2015.
L&T was
in the news recently for sacking over 14000 workers in what was billed as one
of India’s biggest layoffs. Despite the gloom over the sackings, L&T has
reported higher half yearly profits in 2016-17 as compared to last year. In
January last year, journalist Swapan Dasgupta was appointed on the board of
directors of L&T.
Other
significant corporate donors include Indian Tobacco Company (ITC), Bank of
America, General Electric (GE) and DSP Merrill Lynch. But none of them come
even close to the donation of the spiritual trust and the engineering giant.
When seen
together, Mata Amritanandamayi Math and L&T, alone accounted for 35% of the
total voluntary contributions to the Clean India Fund. The Clean India Mission
is one of the key projects of the Modi government and was allocated Rs 9000
crore in last year’s budget. To fund the campaign, a Swachh Bharat cess of 0.5%
on service tax was imposed. The government collected over Rs 3900 crore through
the cess in 2015-16. The mission seeks to eradicate open defecation in India by
the time the present government seeks re-election in 2019.
.JPG)
.JPG)
