National Action Plan for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE)
Source : The Hindu
GS II : Important International institutions, agencies and fora- their structure, mandate

What is discussed under Project Seabird Karwar ?

1. National Action Plan for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE)
2. Swachhta Udyami Yojana

Why in News ?

Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment (MoSJ&E) is now preparing to undertake a nationwide survey to enumerate all people engaged in hazardous cleaning of sewers and septic tanks an activity that has led to at least 351 deaths since 2017.

Key Facts

• • Drawing a distinction between this work and manual scavenging, the Ministry insisted that the practice of manual scavenging no longer

    

    takes place in the country as all manual scavengers had been accounted for and enrolled into the rehabilitation scheme.

  • Enumeration exercise, soon to be conducted across 500 AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation) cities, is part of the Union government’s National Action Plan for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE)
  • This will streamline the process of rehabilitating sanitation workers and eventually merge with and replace the Self-Employment Scheme for the Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers (SRMS), which was started in 2007.
  • Eventually, the idea is to also link these sanitation workers to the Swachhta Udyami Yojana through which the workers will be able to own sanitation machines themselves and the government will ensure that at the municipality level, the work keeps coming in.

Major Challenges

• • Officials added that since 2018, several attempts have been made to identify more manual scavengers, including through the Swachhta mobile app.
  • Registrations on the app turned out to be fake only 6,500 app registrations claiming benefits under the SRMS, none were found to be genuine.

National Action Plan for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem (NAMASTE)

• • The government has developed the NAMASTE scheme—to clean septic tanks and sewers.
  • The NAMASTE project, is a joint project of Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
  • Zero fatalities in sanitation work in India achieved through skilled workers.
  • No sanitation workers should come in direct contact with human faecal matter.
  • Capital subsidies of up to ₹5 lakh on sanitation machinery costing up to ₹15 lakh and interest subsidies on loans, where interest rates will be capped between 4-6% for the beneficiaries
  • Scheme also provides for training the workers in the use of these machines, during which time a stipend of up to ₹3,000 per month will be provided.
  • The scheme will also provide for sanitation workers to train for and go into any of the approved list of alternative occupations in sectors like agriculture, services, electronics assembling, handicrafts and so on.

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