Swachh Bharat lesson: Empower people to clean up the country

As a social reformer, he strove, through personal example, to rid manual labour—especially in the context of sanitary work—of a stigma attached by tradition. As a soldier for peace, he laid his life on the line to oppose communal hatred and strife. 

Recent public discourse and iconography—his spectacles, most visibly—however, has focused on his efforts in the sphere of sanitation and cleanliness. The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) was launched ten years ago with the stated aim of ridding India of open defecation by his 150th birth anniversary in 2019. 

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Millions of toilets were built. The benefits of toilet use were lauded by leaders and publicity material, latrines were dubbed abodes of dignity and public defecation was publicly shamed—with some offenders punished—in the race to that target. 

The country was duly declared open-defecation free (ODF). To the satisfaction of those behind the SBM, studies since then have spied a correlation between its success and a decline in India’s infant mortality rate.

When the incumbent administration took up the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, launched in 2012 to end open defecation by 2022, and converted it into the SBM, it involved more than a change in nomenclature. 

It was transformed from a ministry scheme into a high-profile programme, spearheaded by India’s top leadership and equipped with a well- resourced mission-control unit. 

Mahatma Gandhi’s iconic glasses adorned all SBM messages and signboards, which, together with some of his quotations on the subject, helped lend this mission the character of a popular movement. 

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Yet, the 2019-21 National Family Health Survey found that 19% of all Indians—including 26% of the rural population—still do not have access to toilets and defecate in the open. And the heart-warming link between progress in toilet building and decline in infant mortality seems overblown. 

About 70% of all infant deaths in India are neonatal losses, which would vary little by toilet hygiene. And the other variable tested in the study was toilet availability, rather than use—which is significantly lower. Notably, the national mission to assure every home piped water is still underway. 

Where water must be fetched from a distance in pails and pots, people often hesitate to pour large volumes down a toilet drain. There are sewage constraints too. Typically, what collects in the two-pit toilets built under SBM needs to be cleaned out every three years. 

This brings questions of purity/pollution right home to people who may not yet be culturally prepared for that interrogation. Such factors discourage toilet use. 

Meanwhile, high levels of malnutrition persist with a clear role played by enteric parasites, which, in turn, attests to an ODF India that’s still in the future.

While educational and behaviour-change efforts were made, what the SBM and other such upliftment schemes often tend to overlook is this: People need to be subjects, rather than passive objects, of development. 

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This draws into focus the nation’s emphasis on human agency, dignity and entitlement. It is no wonder that what Mahatma Gandhi sought, above all, was to empower everyone.