PM Modi at the concluding ceremony of Chamaparan Satyagraha's centenary celebrations
Highlights
- 8.5 lakh toilets a week would mean 84 toilets per minute: Tejashwi Yadav
- Tejashwi Yadav disputed PM Modi's remarks, calling it a "big goof-up"
- Even Nitish Kumar won't agree on such false claims: Tejashwi Yadav
On a day Prime Minister Narendra Modi complimented the Bihar government for constructing 8.5 lakh toilets in a week, opposition leader Tejashwi Yadav questioned the claim.
"In the past one week, over 8.5 lakh toilets have been constructed in Bihar and that is not an easy task to do. The speed and development is not a mean feat. This proves that soon Bihar would catch up with the national average," PM Modi had told a gathering of around 20,000 swachhagrahis or cleanliness ambassadors at the concluding ceremony of Champaran Satyagraha centenary celebrations in Bihar's Motihari.
RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, a vocal critic of PM Modi, took to Twitter, listing down a clutch of calculations that arrived at the conclusion that 8.5 lakh toilets in a week would mean over 84 toilets were built in a minute. He also took a dig, saying it was a "big goof-up" by PM Modi.Sources in the Bihar government say 8.5 lakh toilets were constructed between March 13 and April 9. And nearly half of the toilets had already been constructed before the week mentioned by PM Modi but their geo tagging was not done.
The process involves taking a picture of the toilet from a mobile phone with the GPS tracker on so that the coordinates of the location, including latitude and longitude are captured, after which its uploaded on the government's Management Information System to avoid any duplication.
Implementation of the Swachh Bharat scheme has been tardy in Bihar, with only 52 per cent of the households having access to toilets, compared to the national average of 72 per cent.
Mumbai Congress chief Sanjay Nirupam took a swipe at PM Modi's remarks, saying it wasn't "humanly possible to construct toilets at such high speed".
"8.5 lac toilets in a week? That means 1.4 toilets every second. I don't think its humanly possible to construct toilets at such high speed. But it is very much possible for PM Modi to make such false claims at the fag end of his government," he tweeted.