Sharp messaging, strong pitch bolstered govt’s ODF campaign
Experts say many continue to defecate in open due to cultural, caste practices
On October 2, 2014, four months into his first term, Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept with a broomstick the pathway leading to Balmiki Sadan, a 150-year-old temple located inside a housing complex of sanitation workers in the capital. The PM thus kicked off Swachh Bharat, one of his most ambitious public-policy campaigns that seeks, among other things, to ensure every Indian household has a toilet and uses it too.
The campaign was reminiscent of the tidiness project of Singapore’s first PM, Lee Kuan Yew. Yew had launched a modernisation drive based on an ethos of cleanliness, introducing fines and penalties for littering.
Modi scaled up Swachh Bharat to a wider project aimed at building a new national ethos, the bedrock of which is behavioural change. The programme rode on a high pitch of popular culture and public messaging.
According to official estimates, the part of the Swachh Bharat mission dedicated to building toilets has achieved its goal of covering all of rural India.
So far, 100 million toilets covering 500,000 households in all inhabited 699 districts have been built. Yet, building state-funded toilets is easier than getting people to use them, a sample survey tracking the programme revealed this year.
“India has seen a sanitation revolution, and the SBM-G (Swachh Bharat-Gramin) transformed itself into a jan andolan (a people’s movement),” said Parameswaran Iyer, secretary, of the drinking water and sanitation department of the Jal Shakti ministry, which oversees the programme.
Constant messaging, targeting the “minds of the people”, and behavioural change advertisements, apart from monitoring toilet construction through a centralised website, were the “triggering mechanisms” for a “large-scale effect”, according to an official who oversaw the scheme’s design at the time of its inception.
Yet, open defecation is a deeply rooted rural practice. Many individuals with access to toilets still prefer to relieve themselves in the open.
At least 43% of rural people in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, accounting for two-fifths of India’s rural population, still defecated in the open in 2018 because of “cultural and other reasons”, a recent survey found.
The share of rural population openly defecating, however, has greatly reduced from 70% in 2014. That’s among key findings of a team of demographers led by Dianne Coffey, a visiting researcher at the Indian Statistical Institute. The team has been monitoring the flagship sanitation scheme’s progress since its start.
“Although rural latrine ownership increased considerably over this period, open defecation remains very common in these four states. These findings contrast with official claims of completely eliminating open defecation in these states,” said Coffey, who is also the executive director of the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics.The Jal Shakti ministry is now ramping up the Swachh Bharat mission from ODF, shorthand for open-defecation free, to ODF Plus. ODF Plus merges the objective of sanitation and waste management.
“It’s a 10-year strategy now that will run from 2019-2029. It will focus on the need for states
to continue their efforts to sustain the gains of the mission as well as take up organic waste management, plastic waste management, grey water management and black water management,” an official said.
Coffey’s study had also reported that officials often resorted to coercive methods to achieve sanitation goals. “Scheduled Tribe and Schedule Caste households were more likely than households from other social groups to report that they faced coercion,” the study noted.
To counter such practices, on September 27, the Jal Shakti ministry issued an advisory to all states, asking them to “avoid any coercive measures for ensuring construction and usage of toilets”, calling such an approach “unacceptable”,
There are other problems as well, such as deep-rooted caste bias. For example, two Dalit children were thrashed to death by village residents in Madhya Pradesh last week. The children, aged 10 and 12, were defecating in the open near the house of the accused, who belonged to a higher caste and took offence.