THE SWACHH YOGI
PARAMESWARANIYER, 60 Secretary, Department of Drinking Water & Sanitation, Union Ministry for Jal Shakti
Parameswaran Iyer was in Hanoi, Vietnam, watching television with his wife Indira, when Narendra Modi delivered his maiden Independence Day address in Delhi in 2014, calling for a Swachh Bharat (Clean India) mission. He recalls almost falling off his chair when Modi mentioned the lack of toilets and the shame and indignity women faced when they defecated in the open. For a prime minister to bring up a subject not spoken about in polite company, that too from the ramparts of the Red Fort, was unheard of. Param, as his friends call him, was then leading the World Bank’s work on Urban Development and Water/ Sanitation and recalls telling Indira he was keen on returning to India and being part of the programme.
For Param, a Doon School and St Stephen’s College alumnus, sanitation and environment had been something of a religion ever since he joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1981 and was posted in Uttar Pradesh. From 1994 to 1998, he was the founder project director of Swajal, the community-managed rural drinking water and sanitation programme launched by the state. In 1998, he went on deputation to the World Bank as a senior water and sanitation specialist. By 2009, he had decided to quit the IAS and work exclusively for the World Bank, anchoring major sanitation projects in West Asia and then in South Asia. So when he heard Modi’s speech in 2014, he saw it as an opportunity of a lifetime to fulfil the mission of making India open-defecation free (ODF). A year later, on a visit to India, he was sounded out for heading the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) and, by February 2016, he had started work as a Secretary in the Union ministry for drinking water and sanitation which would implement the programme.
The task was truly daunting. Modi, who had a penchant for setting big hairy audacious goals, decided India should be declared an ODF country by October 2, 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. That meant building an incredible 100 million toilets in five years, or 20 million toilets a year. To get an idea of the scale of that ambition, in 2014, despite the massive sanitation programmes launched in the past, only 70 million individual household latrines had been built since Independence. It fulfilled only 39 per cent of the total requirement. The pace of building toilets before SBM was an average 4-5 million a year. The target set now was four times that number. Doubters and naysayers alike scoffed at the ambition. But Modi was clear it had to be done. Soon after Param took charge of the ministry, Modi told him the only way SBM could meet its target was if it was made a jan andolan (people’s movement). The prime minister, along with the then finance minister, the late Arun Jaitley, assured him there would be no shortage of funds for the mission. Terming it a “handsome budget”, Jaitley set aside
Rs 1.3 lakh crore ($20 billion) for five years, to be split between the Centre and states in a 60:40 ratio.
Param realised that to make SBM a success he would first have to launch the world’s largest behavioural change programme. He was, in essence, selling a product that was neither being effectively delivered by the government machinery nor demanded by its market—the people. “It was as difficult as trying to paint the wings of an aeroplane when it was in flight,” he observed. He began by cutting the red tape that characterised his ministry. That meant initiating a mission-mode approach, flattening the organisational hierarchy and bringing in young and fresh talent. He evolved a system of agile planning, strong communications network, including social media posts, and rapid feedback from districts on the progress of the SBM. The new normal for working was from eight till late every day and coming in on Saturdays to have video conferences with district collectors. Param summed up the challenges he faced
“MEETING SWACHH BHARAT MISSION TARGETS WAS AS DIFFICULT AS TRYING TO PAINT THE WINGS OF A PLANE IN FLIGHT”
as the 4Ses. The first S was the scale of the target of 100 million toilets. The second was speed—the time available to accomplish it was less than three years. The third S was stigma, of wiping out centuries of taboo and prejudices regarding toilets in homes. And the fourth was sustainability—how to keep toilets functioning after they had been built.
Aware that sanitation was a state subject, Param knew his ministry could act only as a coordinator, provide financial and technical assistance and monitor the programme. The nuts and bolts of implementation would have to be left to the bureaucracy in the states, districts, panchayats and villages, what he referred to as the PM-CM-DM framework. To this, his team added the concept of VM or village motivator to drive the programme at the grassroots level—each of the 625,000 villages where the SBM would be implemented was to have a designated swachhagrahi. Param made as many as 150 field visits to states to convince senior state leaders and key officials to make the SBM among the top three priorities on their development list and to monitor its implementation. To bring about behavioural change and to enable rapid construction of toilets, the team involved over 120 million students, 1 million masons (many of them women), 250,000 sarpanches, 700 district magistrates and over 500 young professionals in the districts. Mass media too was roped in, as was Bollywood, to spread the message. Akshay Kumar contributed with his hit—Toilet: Ek Prem Katha.
It was a proud day for the SBM team when the prime minister declared India ODF on October 2, 2019, meeting the target he had set five years ago. By then, the SBM team had built a record 106.2 million toilets and had made 599,000 villages, 699 districts and 4,303 cities ODF. While his critics (and there are many) point to his obsession with numbers rather than usage, Param prefers to quote the National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) to answer them. Conducted between November 2018 and February 2019, with a sample size of 92,000 households across 6,136 villages, NARSS found sanitation coverage to be a high 93 per cent and the usage among those who had access to toilets to be as much as 95 per cent. As regards the impact of the programme, the SBM estimates that it saved close to 300,000 lives between 2014 and 2019, which would otherwise have been lost to a wide range of diseases
as a result of poor sanitation facilities. In 2017, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s assessment of the health impacts of the SBM showed that it had resulted in 32 per cent fewer cases of diarrhoea among children in ODF areas apart from 32 per cent fewer cases of women with low body mass index.
Param classifies the key lessons he learnt from implementing the SBM as the 4Ps: political leadership, public financing, partnerships and people’s participation. Param believes that the first P—the political leadership and support that Modi provided—and the last P—people’s participation— were vital to SBM’s success. He admits there’s still plenty of work to do. Apart from sustaining the ODF status, the next big step is to implement solid and liquid waste management, especially in urban areas. Also, ensuring that the made-inIndia, twin-pit latrines built in villages across the country as part of the SBM remain functional.
There is a sense of urgency even now in the way Param goes about his business. A white board in his office records a daily count of the number of days he has spent on the job and the number of days he has left, an idea his wife gave him. On December 15, it read: Days spent, 1,386. Days left (for his contract with the government to expire): 136. For Param, the standout moment was not the announcement of the number of toilets built by October 2019; it was in February 2017, when he entered one of the twin pits of a toilet in Warangal district in Telangana and personally emptied out the dried and decomposed waste to demonstrate its safety and use as organic compost—possibly the best gestural evidence of the sustainability of the SBM. ■