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-ondeck-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 states, between the 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. 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 programmes. 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. 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 citizens, the administration, and independent parties. It subsequently incentivised 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.
The mission has also relied on strategically utilising resources and social capital from other ministries. Under the Swachhata Action Plan, various non-sanitation departments have contributed an additional ~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.
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.
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, and most importantly, 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, or by being put to use in road construction, or as fuel in cement kilns.
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.