CHANDIGARH: The Haryana government took Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swacch Bharat campaign to a new height on Tuesday by deciding to recruit only those people for select jobs who don’t defecate in the open.

Advertisements issued by the District Rural Development Agency (DRDA) Kurukshetra in prominent dailies on Tuesday said for the post of block coordinators, preference will be given to candidates “not defecating in the open”. The candidates must be graduates. Similar conditions have been prescribed for the post of cluster motivators in the same advertisement.

To ensure that the selected candidates do not violate the stipulated conditions, they will have to give a written undertaking that they use toilets and don’t defecate in the open, officials said. They will then work under the central government’s Clean India Mission.

Prabhjot Singh, additional deputy commissioner-cum-chief executive officer of DRDA Kurukshetra said the state government put in the toilet condition after guidelines were received for the Clean India Mission from the central government. “Conditions in the advertisement are just reproduction of the Centre’s guidelines,” he said.

According to the 2011 census, Haryana has 47.18 lakh households of which 69% have toilets while nearly 30% people defecate in the open. Just about 1% households depend on public toilets.

This is for the first time that the Manohar Lal Khattar government has put such a condition for government jobs. Earlier, the state government had amended the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act and made toilet-at-home condition mandatory for those contesting panchayat polls. However, this was stayed by the Supreme Court after three women challenged the amendments. The other conditions included a minimum educational qualification of Class X for those contesting for the sarpanch’s post.

Read this story in Marathi

