Swachh Bharat Abhiyan : Introduction, Approach, History, Plans, Conclusion

According to a survey in 2011, over 26 million people in India defecated in the open. Around 60 percent of Indians did not have access to safe and private toilets. Such overwhelming majority of those without access to sanitation facilities posed a formidable obstacle in the development of the nation.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is one of the many famous and vital missions in the History of India. This campaign was announced on August 15, 2014, and it was introduced by our honorable Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. It was launched on October 2, 2014, to honor Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a cleanness. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan was done on a national level and encompassed all the towns and villages. It served as a significant purpose in making people aware of the importance of cleanliness, hygienic, and healthy India.

Some have argued that the SBM policy framework is merely a continuation of the shortcomings of the NBA, and that ending open defecation by constructing toilets cannot fully realise the fundamental right to sanitation. Our field visits across different districts showed that households despite having toilets built, were not being used. A 2015 CAG report on the NBA echoed this in their five year audit of the programme, stating that “more than 30% of Individual Household Latrines (IHHLs) were defunct/non-functional for reasons like poor quality of construction, incomplete structure, non-maintenance, etc.”

It is in this context that Public Affairs Centre (PAC), engaged in a research-to-action project to assess and advocate for community-led participation in the SBM-G (G-Gramin) in two diametrically opposite administrative spectrums in terms of implementation: the states of Odisha and Tamil Nadu. According to government data, the former was a worse-performing state and the latter a better-performing one; we focused on six districts in each state.

Approach :-

With the help of Social Accountability Tools (SATs) we got a more nuanced understanding of what beneficiaries experienced during the earlier rural sanitation programmes. The first Citizen Report Card exercise carried out in 2014 highlighted the following critical shortcomings:

Non-consultation with end-users (resulting in lack of ‘ownership’)
Faulty construction of the toilets
Lack of awareness on the health risks of open defecation

Specifically, we used –

Citizen Report Cards (CRCs), a simple yet powerful tool to provide public agencies with systematic feedback from users of public services. By collecting feedback on the quality and adequacy of public services from actual users, CRCs provide a rigorous basis and a proactive agenda for communities, civil society organisations and/or local governments to engage in a dialogue with service providers to improve the delivery of public services. We used CRCs to collect user and provider feedback at the beginning of the project as well as after two years of the SBM-G programme being launched. We carried out CRC+ exercises to understand any discrepancies in internal fund flows and functional responsibilities within the system.

We also used Community Score Cards (CSCs), which like CRCs, are an instrument to exact social and public accountability and responsiveness from service providers. The CSC process includes an interface meeting between service providers and the community, so that there is a dialogue as well as immediate joint action.

During the course of our work PAC used the meetings specific to the Community Score Card (CSC) exercises–sharing of entitlements, scoring by communities of users–to discuss perceptions on toilet usage and challenges connected with toilet construction to voice their feedback directly to the government officials. The CSC exercises created a platform for the communities and providers to work out Joint Action Plans (JAPs) to immediately improve efficiency in toilet construction with household buy-in.

Our partners in Tamil Nadu were at two levels–Community Based Organisations (CBOs, such as SCOPE and Annai Trust) working in sanitation in each of the selected districts, and the foot-soldiers, particularly the women volunteers who were empowered to understand the process of toilet construction and understand lapses if any. Our lessons from both Tamil Nadu and Orissa underlined the importance of an extremely contextual, localised approach when operationalising the SBM-G, in order to enable meaningful universal sanitation coverage. Our belief is simple–community empowerment leads to change which then leads to informed demands

Non-consultation with end-users (resulting in lack of ‘ownership’)
Faulty construction of the toilets
Lack of awareness on the health risks of open defecation

Specifically, we used –

Historical perspective :-

The Government of India launched the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) with effect from April 1, 1999. To provide a major fillip to the TSC, the government launched an incentive scheme in June 2003 in the form of an award for comprehensive sanitation coverage, preservation and protection of environment and open defecation-free panchayat villages, blocks, and districts namely Nirmal Gram Puraskar. The TSC was further renamed as Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA). On October 2, 2014, the campaign was renamed and launched as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan or Swachh Bharat Abhiyan Mission (SBM) to fulfill Mahatma Gandhi`s vision of ‘Clean India’.

Plans :-

Construction of individual, cluster & community toilets.
The village will be kept clean, including through solid and liquid waste management through Gram Panchayat.
The water pipeline had to be laid to all towns and enabling tap connection to every household on demand by 2019.
Improve the growth percentage of toilets from 3% to 10% by the end of 2019
Involvement of school kids in the activities for spreading awareness on Sanitation, Hygiene& Water.

Most importantly, public awareness will be provided about the drawback of open defecation and the promotion of toilets use by recruiting dedicated ground staff. For proper sanitation use, the mission will aim to change people’s attitudes, mindsets, and behavior.

Conclusion :-

Though people have started to pitch in to help spread the message of ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’, we still have miles to go. The government needs to work on the entire sanitation value chain including water supply, safe disposal and treatment of waste, and maintenance of infrastructure. The construction of toilets as well as awareness campaigns needs the backing of the state for regular monitoring of the toilet use. Not only this, there is a need to engage the community also to address the age-old practices in the rural areas.

The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has started showing its results in the current times where 25 states have been already declared Open Defecation Free and efforts are already in progress to make other state join the club of ODF. At this juncture, every countryman should take a pledge that he/she will contribute towards making India clean in the true sense of the term and then only we can pay tribute in real sense to Mahatma Gandhi on his 150^th birth anniversary in 2019