Swachh Bharat Mission
Swachh Bharat Mission or Swachh Bharat Abhiyan or Clean India Mission was a country-wide campaign from 2014 to 2019, to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management in urban and rural areas in India. The objectives of the mission also included eradication of manual scavenging, generating awareness and bringing about a behavior change regarding sanitation practices, and augmentation of capacity at the local level. Initiated by the Government of India, the mission aimed to achieve an "open-defecation free" India by 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi. The mission aimed at progressing towards target 6.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals Number 6 established by the United Nations in 2015.
The campaign's official name is in Hindi, in English it translates to "Clean India Mission". The campaign was officially launched on 2 October 2014 at Rajghat, New Delhi by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It is India's largest cleanliness drive to date with three million government employees and students from all parts of India participating in 4,043 cities, towns, and rural communities. At a rally in Champaran, the Prime minister called the campaign Satyagrah se Swachhagrah in reference to Gandhi's Champaran Satyagraha launched on 10 April 1916.
The mission was split into two: rural and urban. In rural areas "SBM - Gramin" was financed and monitored through the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation; whereas "SBM - urban" was overseen by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs.
As part of the campaign, volunteers, known as Swachhagrahis, or "Ambassadors of cleanliness", promoted indoor plumbing and community approaches to sanitation at the village level. Other activities included national real-time monitoring and updates from non-governmental organizations such as The Ugly Indian, Waste Warriors, and SWaCH Pune.
The government provided subsidy for construction of nearly 110 million toilets between 2014 and 2019, although many Indians especially in rural areas choose to not use them. The campaign was criticized for using coercive approaches to force people to use toilets. Many households were threatened with a loss of benefits such as access to electricity or food entitlements through the public distribution system.
Background
and contamination of drinking and bathing water has been an endemic sanitary problem in India. In 2014, India was the country with the highest number of people practicing open defecation, around 530 million people.Launch
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan campaign, launched on 2 October 2014 on birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, aimed to eradicate open defecation by 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, by constructing 90 million toilets in rural India at a projected cost of. The national campaign spanned 4,041 statutory cities and towns. conceived in March 2014 at a sanitation conference organised by UNICEF India and the Indian Institute of Technology as part of the larger Total Sanitation Campaign, which the Indian government launched in 1999.Previous sanitation campaigns
A formal sanitation programme was first launched in 1954, followed by Central Rural Sanitation Programme in 1986, Total Sanitation Campaign in 1999 and Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in 2012. A limited randomized study of eighty villages in rural showed that the TSC programme did modestly increase the number of households with latrines, and had a small effect in reducing open defecation. However, there was no improvement in the health of children." The earlier "Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan" rural sanitation program was hampered by the unrealistic approach. Consequently, Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was restructured by Cabinet approval on 24 September 2014 as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. The rural household toilet coverage in India increased from 1% in 1981 to 11% in 1991, to 22% in 2001, to 32.7% in 2011.Structure
Components
The core objectives of the mission were to reduce open defecation and improve management of municipal solid waste in both urban and rural areas. Elimination of open defecation was to be achieved through construction of individual household level toilets, community toilets and public toilets. For improving solid waste management, cities were encouraged to prepare detailed project reports that are bankable and have a financial model.Finance
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is expected to cost over. The government provides an incentive of for each toilet constructed by a rural family. An amount of was allocated for the mission in the 2016 Union budget of India. The World Bank provided a loan and $25 million in technical assistance in 2016 for the Swachh Bharat Mission to support India's universal sanitation initiation. The programme has also received funds and technical support from the World Bank, corporations as part of corporate social responsibility initiatives, and by state governments under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan schemes.Promotional campaigns
Selected public figures and brand ambassadors
| Early 2014 | Late 2014 | 2015 | 2017 and 2018 |
| Prime Minister Modi selected the following public figures to propagate this campaign: | Brand ambassadors nominated by Prime Minister Modi in 2 Oct 2014:
| On 5 January 2015, the minister in-charge nominated followed Telugu icons as brand ambassadors. | From later dates the following public icons were nominated as National Brand Ambassadors by Prime Minister Modi to join and support the Swachh Bharat Mission: |
Other notable activities
Planned initiatives
Performance monitoring
Swachh Bharat Mission Mobile app is being used by people and Government organisations for achieving the goals of Swachh Bharat Mission. For this the government of India is bringing awareness to the people through advertisements.In 2017, the national sanitation coverage rose to 65% from 38.7% on Oct 2, 2014 before the start of the campaign. It was 90% in August 2018. 35 states/Union Territories, 699 districts and 5.99 lakh villages were declared Open Defecation Free by 25 September 2019.
The cities and towns which have been declared ODF stood at 22 percent and the urban wards which have achieved 100 percent door-to-door solid waste collection stood at 50 percent. The number of Swachhagrahi volunteers working across urban local bodies rose to 20,000, and those working in rural India rose to more than a lakh. The number of schools with separate toilet facilities for girls rose from 0.4 million to almost one million.
Swachh Survekshan annual cleanliness survey
, commissioned by Ministry of Urban Development and carried out by Quality Council of India, is an extensive sanitation survey across several hundred cities to check the progress and impact of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and to foster a spirit of competition among the cities. The performance of each city is evaluated on six parameters:- Municipal solid waste, sweeping, collection and transportation
- Municipal solid waste, processing, and disposal of solid waste
- Open defecation free and toilets
- Capacity building and eLearning
- Provision of public toilets and community toilets
- Information, education and communication, and behavior change
Impacts
Further, more that 81.5 thousand wards in urban areas now have100% door to door collection of solid waste and nearly 65 thousand wards practice 100% segregation of waste at source. Of the nearly 150 thousand metric tonnes of solid waste generated in urban areas, 65% is being processed.
An independent survey released by Quality Council of India in August 2017, reported that overall national rural "household access to toilet" coverage increased to 62.5% and usage of toilets to 91.3%, with Haryana topping the national ranking with 99% of households in rural areas covered and usage of toilets of 100%. World Health Organization has in its report stated that at least 180,000 diarrhoeal deaths were averted in rural India since the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission. According to a survey carried out in 2018 and published in 2019 by National Statistical Office, 71% of rural households had access to toilets as of 2018. Though this was at odds with the Indian government's claim in 2019 that 95% of rural households had access to toilets, NSO's numbers still indicated a significant improvement over the situation during the previous survey period in 2012, when only 40% of rural households had access to toilets.
Criticism
The mission is noted as the world’s largest sanitation program. It claimed to have provided millions of people access to toilet and brought about a change of behavior towards its usage. Many argue that it has not really eliminated open defecation as rapidly as the government claims. It has accelerated the pace of decline in open defecation.Allocation of funds
Constructing toilets became the mission's singular focus, even though elimination of open defecation and improving solid waste management were core objectives. Funds for solid waste management under the mission were diverted towards toilet construction. Allocations for other sectors were also drastically reduced. Though behavioral change is one of the goals of the mission, only 1% of the mission’s outlay was spent on education and awareness. Most of the allocation for the category, “information, education and communication”, that was to be used for awareness generation was spent towards print, radio and television advertisements. No part of the Central Government’s allocation was spent on awareness generation at the grass roots.Target driven approach
The target driven approach also had its fallout; it lacked legitimacy due to extreme methods like coercion and threats like discontinuation of subsidized food grains and education of their children. Households from the marginalized sections like the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes reported facing harassment and humiliation at the hands of swacchgrahis, who were often local elites.The SBM has also been criticized for being subsidy-driven rather than community-driven.
Survey results
Further, open defecation was never monitored by the mission, both the ministries kept a track of toilets constructed and funds spent. The reality reported by independent surveys was very different from that reported by Government sponsored surveys. Researchers also found divergence between findings of the National Family Health Survey and National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey ; both conducted by the Government only a few months apart. The implausible target created incentives to distort the information, indeed the number of toilets constructed were inflated as local officials faced intense pressure to meet the targets. Villages, districts, towns and cities and even states declared themselves open defecation free based on achievement of construction targets.Interconnected challenges
By adding millions of on-site sanitation systems and not considering fecal sludge management, it will further add to pollution of the rivers in India.There is skepticism about the success of SBM which relates to sanitation workers. In 2015, one year after the launch of the program, hundreds of thousands of Indian people were still employed as manual scavengers in emptying bucket toilets and pit latrines. The people who make India clean, the sanitation workers, remain "invisible in the participation, process or consequences of this national level movement".
The SBM missed the opportunity to address interconnected challenges together; namely the issue that untouchability and social inequality are important parts of why open defecation continues.
A report by WSSCC in 2019 found that the impact of the SBM for the most vulnerable was limited. The report stated that "Barriers due to physical disabilities, social/economic disparities, geography, sexual orientation, gender and caste were not addressed."