The Congress on Saturday accused the Narendra Modi government of manipulating data to make false claims about the Swachh Bharat Mission, calling the “Clean India” campaign “completely hollow”.

Jairam Ramesh, former Union minister for drinking water and sanitation, cited reports of the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) and a parliamentary panel that have both questioned the government’s claims.

Ramesh also questioned the focus on construction of toilets and said they were being built indiscriminately but not being used because of lack of supporting amenities.

A CAG report, he said, has stated that “household water connections were not available and, therefore, toilets constructed under SBM could not be used”.

He also quoted a July report of the Lok Sabha standing committee on rural development that said the government’s “sanitation coverage figures seemed to be more on ‘paper’ but the actual progress at the ground level is very lethargic... building of toilets alone is not sufficient for the realisation of actual vision of an Open Defecation Free (ODF) country”.

The Congress questioned how the campaign could succeed without access to clean drinking water. “Allocations for drinking water have been slashed since the Modi government took office,” it said.

The Congress also referred to the recent deaths of manual scavengers, wondering why this was happening when the UPA government had banned the practice in 2013 through a law, more so when the BJP itself had announced the end of manual scavenging as its next mission at the party’s national executive meeting in 2015.

Saturday’s statement, the first of a series christened “Sach Bharat” (True India), places on record that Swachh Bharat is essentially the UPA’s Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan.

“PM Modi adopted a successful UPA programme… renamed and rebranded it, and then launched it with much fanfare in 2014, as Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). The failed implementation of the Mission and the fake propaganda surrounding it are truly representative of the hollowness of the Modi government’s flagship programmes,” the party said.