India’s premier is making his people’s No. 2 habits his No. 1 duty.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has created a cleanliness program that will track whether the rural masses are using the toilets, Reuter reports.
In a bid to wipe out hygiene-related diseases, officials will use mobile phones, tablets and iPads to keep a toilet use log – with results posted online in real time.
“Earlier, the monitoring was done only about the construction of toilets, but now the actual use of toilets will be ascertained,” the government said in a statement on Wednesday.
Upset with the country’s sanitation problems, Modi irked government officials in October when he had them come to work during a national holiday to clean toilets. He promised spend the next five years cleaning up the problem.
Roughly 626 million Indians defecate in the open compared with 14 million in China, the World Health Organization found in 2012.
The country’s lack of toilets costs Indian more than $50 billion yearly – primarily from early deaths and diseases, a World bank study found, Reuters reports. The study cited India’s poor collection of human waste.
The government has sought financial donations from companies as it doubled spending to build toilets.