The distinctiveness, and success, of Swachh Bharat
With a bottom-up approach, India has become a global leader in sanitation. Plastic waste management is next
The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) is a leading example of an all-hands-on-deck-approach towards achieving a crucial national goal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi envisioned SBM to become a people’s movement, and it has truly become everyone’s priority. The partnerships and convergence that this programme has achieved, across the central administrative machinery, across states, between public and private sectors, and most importantly between the government and its citizens is unique.
Since the speech by the PM in 2014, the world’s largest behaviour change programme has managed to make incredible strides – increasing India’s sanitation coverage from 39% to nearly 100% in just five years. In a country, as large and diverse as India, it has actively mobilised and galvanised 1.3 billion people. Over 10 crore toilets have been built across rural India so far, and over 5.99 lakh villages and 699 districts have been declared Open Defecation Free (ODF).
A significant reason for why this has been possible is because SBM followed a bottom-up approach to behaviour change, and a widespread partnership driven approach to implementation. SBM followed a demand-driven approach, as opposed to the supply-driven approach of previous sanitation programs. It focused on strong Information Education and Communication (IEC) and Inter-personal Communication (IPC) strategies to “trigger” the communities through over six-lakh swachhagrahis. Panchayat members, ASHA and anganwadi workers, women, children, youth workers, school teachers, senior citizens, and the differently abled took ownership of, and led the swachhata brigade in their communities.
At the same time, the mission seamlessly promoted the basic principles of cooperative federalism. While it provided ample flexibility to states to tweak the campaign and delivery mechanisms to suit their cultural contexts, it also built effective monitoring systems to track progress, such as geo-tagging of toilets, and multiple layers of verification by the people and by the administration, including verification by independent parties and subsequently incentivising the best-performing states and districts. The National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS 2019-20), conducted by an independent verification agency under the World Bank support project to SBM broadly confirms these achievements for rural India. Based on interviews with over 90,000 households covering all states in a representative manner, it found that over 96% of households with toilets used them regularly. This is indeed a testament to the success of the behaviour change centric approach of SBM.
The mission has also relied on strategically utilising the resources and social capital from other ministries. Under the Swachhata Action Plan, various non-sanitation departments have contributed an additional Rs 45,000 crore for sanitation in their respective sectors, including highways, petrol pumps, railways, schools, hospitals, and others. They have further strived to make sanitation everyone’s business. National and international development partners were also roped in to play key roles through technical assistance, content creation, and human resource support.
The success of SBM has created a blueprint for large-scale participatory development programmes, and other programmes of the government are in fact imbibing many facets of it. For example, the POSHAN scheme is leveraging the social capital of various grassroots functionaries, volunteers, self -help groups, and swachhagrahis, to bring about behaviour change at the grassroots. It is also monitoring the performance of the states on various indicators to measure their performance and make it available on a real-time dashboard. Similar to the Swachh Bharat preraks initiative where (over 500 young professionals are placed at the district level by Tata Trusts to work with the respective administrations on SBM, the POSHAN Abhiyaan has deployed more than 300 Swasth Bharat Preraks across various districts to provide technical and managerial support to state and district administration. It is also attempting to develop a convergence action plan with 10 related ministries/departments along the lines of the swachhata action plans.
SBM has also created several economic opportunities. The Toilet Board Coalition estimates that the “sanitation economy” in India will be worth $62 billion by 2021, creating many new jobs, even in the most rural areas of the country, apart from reducing health and environmental costs, and generating savings for households. Many people engaged in the business of manufacturing toilet related hardware accessories have reported large growth in sales during the SBM period, and they project a continued uptrend through retrofitting and upgrade. The government is now focusing on enhancing access to solid and liquid waste management, faecal sludge management, and most important, plastic waste management.
In a major step towards curbing plastic waste pollution, the PM during his Independence Day speech called on the nation to curb the use of single use plastic (SUP), and to collect plastic waste from their villages, towns and neighbourhoods on October 2. The collected waste will be safely disposed by being ploughed back into the economic cycle, either by getting recycled, by being put to use in road construction, or as fuel in cement kilns. This plastic waste, if managed optimally, can be used to generate wealth, and can be an opportunity for us to set in place systems to tackle the menace of plastic pollution in a safe and sustainable manner.
India has emerged as a global leader in sanitation. Now, it is time for us to become a global leader in plastic waste management as well. The success of SBM is sure to inspire policy makers and programme implementers around the world who are envisioning large scale transformations along the lines of SBM.
Amitabh Kant is CEO, NITI Aayog
The views expressed are personal