Laudable as the Swachh Bharat mission is, there’s a long way to go before we inculcate behaviour change
As India inches closer towards the goal of becoming open defecation-free by 2019, which will also mark the 150th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, the Prime Minister’s four-year-old Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is perhaps the best tribute to the torch-bearer of cleanliness and sanitation in India whose birth anniversary we marked on Gandhi Jayanti earlier this week. The Prime Minister’s flagship scheme, which aims to make rural and urban India cleaner than ever before by 2019, has been applauded domestically and internationally. While the UN termed it as the “biggest movement" for public health, hygiene and sanitation in the world, UNICEF lauded the Modi Government for making the country defecation-free a high priority. The WHO, too, lauded India’s efforts and said that “India has elevated the challenge of ending open-defecation to the highest level”. Certainly, India has raised the benchmark for other developing countries as it is close to achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Developments Goals on sanitation 11 years before the deadline set. It isn’t surprising that China and Pakistan too have taken a cue from us to launch similar campaigns. Swachh Bharat, it must be pointed out, takes forward the achievements of its predecessor schemes launched by the UPA Government — Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan and Total Sanitation Campaign — in its coverage which saw a 54 per cent jump in the last four years. More than 4,50,000 villages are now defecation-free. Importantly, India improved its metrics of accounting for 60 per cent of the global population defecating in open; the figure now stands at 20 per cent.
The not-so-good news is that unfortunately, for many in officialdom the sole objective of the Swachh Bharat scheme has come to rest solely on the construction of toilets. The latest NFHS–4 report made it clear that while open defecation has become less common than it was 10 years ago, it is still highly prevalent. It must be said that the Government’s effort has been not just limited to the construction of toilets; it has launched advertisement and publicity campaigns at metro stations, on television, radio and online to spread the message of swachhata. The Prime Minister himself has used every opportunity and platform to literally pick up the broom and clean streets and this has led other well-known personalities from various fields to follow suit. But the problem in India is also to do with notions of ‘dirty' which contemporary caste biases still underline. For example, ritual cleanliness matters more than physical cleansing for many and anything to do with the loo, as it were, is considered ‘dirty' and not a job fit for so-called upper castes. Here lies the challenge for the Swachh Mission — to change mindsets. And that will take some time.