Swachh Bharat Mission

India's prime minister Modi at a rally to promote Swachh Bharat Mission

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 ₹1.96 lakh crore (US$27 billion).[15][16][17] The national campaign spanned 4,041 statutory cities and towns.[18][19] 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.[20]

A formal sanitation programme was first launched in 1954, followed by Central Rural Sanitation Programme in 1986, Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) in 1999 and Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in 2012.[21][22][23][24] A limited randomized study of eighty villages in rural (Madhya Pradesh) 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."[25][26] The earlier "Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan" rural sanitation program was hampered by the unrealistic approach.[27][28][29] Consequently, Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was restructured by Cabinet approval on 24 September 2014 as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.[19] 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.[30]

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 (often twin pit pour flush pit latrines), community toilets and public toilets.[31] For improving solid waste management, cities were encouraged to prepare detailed project reports that are bankable and have a financial model.[31]

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is expected to cost over ₹620 billion (US$8.7 billion).[6][32] The government provides an incentive of ₹12,000 (US$170) for each toilet constructed by a rural family.[15] An amount of ₹90 billion (US$1.3 billion) was allocated for the mission in the 2016 Union budget of India.[18][33] The World Bank provided a US$1.5 billion loan and $25 million in technical assistance in 2016 for the Swachh Bharat Mission to support India's universal sanitation initiation.[17] 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.[16]

• Anushka Sharma and the Vice President of India M V Naidu picked up a broom to help clean the cyclone-hit port city of Visakhapatnam, in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, as part of the cleanliness campaign.[46]
• Prime Minister Modi nominated a number of organisations in October 2014 to be "brand ambassadors", including the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, Eenadu and India Today as well as the dabbawala of Mumbai, who deliver home-made food to lakhs of people in the city. More than 3 million government employees and school and college students participated in the drive on the occasion.[47][48]
• A Swachh Bharat Run, attended by 1,500 runners, was organized at the Rashtrapati Bhavan on 2 October 2014.[49][50]
• Kunwar Bai Yadav lived in a village in Dhamtari district and sold seven of her goats to raise the money to build a toilet at her house at age 106 in 2016. She was declared a mascot of the campaign and visited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
• Inspired by the Clean India Mission, a robot named Swachh Bot was built by a maker community in Chennai to clean the wastes on Besant Nagar beach.[15][51]

Indian Naval Academy cadets taking part in Swachh Bharat Mission, 2016

The Government appointed CPWD with the responsibility to dispose of waste from Government offices.[52] The Ministry of Railways planned to have the facility of cleaning on demand, clean bed-rolls from automatic laundries, bio-toilets, dustbins in all non-AC coaches.[53][54] The Swachh Bharat Swachh Vidyalaya campaign was launched by the Minister of Human Resource Development, Government of India by participating in the cleanliness drive along with the school's teachers and students.[55][56]

Swachh Survekshan, 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

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.[70] 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.[71][72] 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.[72][70] No part of the Central Government’s allocation was spent on awareness generation at the grass roots.[70][72]

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.[73] 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.[73]

The SBM has also been criticized for being subsidy-driven rather than community-driven.[74]

Further, open defecation was never monitored by the mission, both the ministries kept a track of toilets constructed and funds spent.[69] The reality reported by independent surveys was very different from that reported by Government sponsored surveys.[75] Researchers also found divergence between findings of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) and National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS); both conducted by the Government only a few months apart.[69] 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.[73] Villages, districts, towns and cities and even states declared themselves open defecation free (ODF) based on achievement of construction targets.

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.[76]

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.[77][78][79] The people who make India clean, the sanitation workers, remain "invisible in the participation, process or consequences of this national level movement".[80]^:7

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.[73]