ISLAMABAD, Sept 19: Federal Minister of State for Environment Malik Amin Aslam said here on Tuesday that the national sanitation policy had been formulated and submitted to the federal cabinet for approval.

He was speaking at a meeting held on the eve of the Second South Asian Conference on Sanitation (Sacosan) to commence here on Wednesday. Over 400 delegates from Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan are attending the two-day conference.

The first Sacosan was held in Dhaka in 2003 to expedite work on plans to provide clean and healthy sanitation environment to the masses. The theme of the Islamabad conference is ‘Sanitation for All’.

The minister urged the delegates to come up with concrete recommendations, particularly with reference to the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), which could be fine-tuned at the ministry and accommodated in the national policy.

Other speakers said that over 1.4 billion people live in South Asia, and according to a recent survey, over 880 million of them were deprived of sanitation facilities.

The government planned to spend over Rs120 billion on improving sanitation facilities in the country over the next five years, they said.

According to the speakers, presently only 42 per cent of the population has access to sanitation. Of them, 65 per cent live in urban areas. The government plans to increase the urban percentage to 75 and the rural percentage to 45 in the next five years.

They said that sanitation was one of the Millennium Development Goals of the government meant to be achieved over the next few years. They said that a lot of efforts had to be made by all the stake-holders — the government, civil society organisations, community, donors, etc — to bring about a change in the attitude and behaviour of the bureaucracy and the community to introduce the policy of CLTS.