The government has turned to state run companies to contribute to an account that has been created to finance the Prime Minister’s pet Swachh Bharat programme.
The Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) has sent out an advisory, asking public sector undertakings to deposit the money that they could not spend on Corporate Social Responsibility programmes in the last fiscal year in the Swachh Bharat Kosh (SBK), said officials at two PSUs.
“It is not an order, but an advisory asking us to deposit the money that we could not spent last fiscal (year). We have deposited the money that we could not spend last year in the SBK,“ said one of the officials.
DPE didn’t respond until press ti me on Thursday to an email see king comment. Steel Authority of India, when contacted for a response, said it has achieved its CSR targets for the last fiscal year and so didn’t deposit any money in the fund.
SAIL has achieved 100% compliance by constructing 672 toilets in schools, the state-run company said. “Apart from toilet construction, cleanliness campaign has been undertaken all across the organisation.“
According to the new Companies Act, a company with a net worth of `100 crore or more has to set aside a minimum 2% of the three-year average annual net profit for CSR activities.
During the first year (2015-16) of the new CSR rules, PSUs spent about` `2,386.60 crore on CSR activities, which was 71% of what they should have under the rules. During the last fiscal year, 460 companies, including 51 PSUs, spent a little over `6,337 crore on CSR activities.
In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha in May , Corporate Affairs Minister Arun Jaitley said companies contributed `42.64 crore to the Swachh Bharat Kosh, the account created to fund the cleanliness drive. They spent also `15.49 crore towards the `Clean Ganga Fund’.
If the PSUs put in all the unspent money in the account, that would be close to `1,000 crore.
Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International, which brought the concept of pay-and-use toilets to India, doesn’t see paucity of funds holding back the Swachh Bharat Plan.
“Our Prime Minister made cleaning India a mission and that has led to a change, where people have started talking about toilets and cleanliness that is an achievement. But you cannot expect the bureaucracy to implement such a mission. Its implementation will be faster if both urban and rural development ministers come together with non-government organisations to implement this,“ Pathak told ET.
Money can never be a hurdle in achieving the target of building 12 crore toilets in India, he said.