Swachh Bharat Mission: More Than What You See In This Report

The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), launched by the Government of India in 2014, is said to be a programme close to the heart of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Under this, building toilets and freeing India of open defecation became a national mission.

Between 2014 to 2020, 10 crore and 40 lakh toilets had been constructed across 60,000 villages making them free of open defecation.

But how effective has SBM really been?

Rahul Gandhi, who is now the leader of the opposition in Indian Parliament, ridiculed the mission openly. In 2015, soon after the launch of the mission, Gandhi was interacting with the students of the prestigious Mount Carmel College for women in Bengaluru and made a swipe at the SBM, rhetorically asking how cleaning the nation could be a strategic national programme and said it had failed anyway. Interestingly, the college students responded with overwhelming support for the mission.

A study has been done by researchers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), University of California and The Ohio State University on the effect of SBM. They analysed data from 35 Indian states and 640 districts spanning 10 years. The chosen decade of the study, 2011-2020, included both pre-SBM and post-SBM periods. They mapped ‘changes in Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) and Under 5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) and toilet access at the district level over time.’

The results have been published in Nature’s Scientific Reports journal.

The researchers say:

Quite significantly SBM has been designed and implemented with the awareness of its importance for child welfare in India. It is the children from the marginalised and economically deprived sections of the society that are at the heart of SBM.  

One should remember that these words were written in 2019, five years before the current study.

This is no small achievement. The book, Sanity in Sanitation, shows the kind of dangers that the implementing of the mission faced – from community relations to religious beliefs.

A reading of the chapter on SBM implementation in Porbandar reveals the dedication, zeal, emotional intelligence, and strategic administrative abilities required to make the mission a success. This is just one told story. If we imagine the countless untold stories from SBM’s execution across 60,000 villages, we can begin to grasp the immense efforts behind achieving these results.

One should also remember that the Nature magazine published quite a biased op-ed story against the government of Narendra Modi, and during the election campaign at that. One can read all about it here. Hence, Nature’s Scientific Reports publishing this empirical data-based recognition of the accomplishment of SBM, acquires even more significance.

--The paper, 'Toilet construction under the Swachh Bharat Mission and infant mortality in India', by Chakrabarti, S., Gune, S., Bruckner, T.A. et al. is available here.

-Amazon link for 'Sanity in Sanitation' here.