Swachh Bharat, Two Years Later

Two years ago, on October 2, 2014, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government launched a national campaign for cleanliness, dubbed the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (स्वच्छ भारत अभियान), or the Clean India Campaign. Despite launching numerous initiatives in his first 30 months in office, the Clean India Campaign is one that has been close to the prime minister’s heart.

Ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, Modi has spoken openly about India’s cleanliness problem. Cleanliness has been a major issue in India; to put it more sharply, India--with many exceptions, of course--is a distinctively dirty place, a fact that has been observed by both Indians and non-Indians alike. While many Indians bristle at this, it is clear to most globetrotters that India is significantly less clean than many other countries at comparable levels of development. Last year, a South Asia correspondent at the New York Times, Gardiner Harris, observed this, noting that “the most populous, polluted, unsanitary, and bacterially unsafe [city] on earth” was Delhi. Additionally, he noted that 13 of the 25 most polluted cities in the world are in India.

India’s cleanliness problems stem from a range of sources. These include the dumping of trash nearly anywhere, the lack of proper sanitation and sewage in many places, and people spitting paan (a confection that stains things brown) onto walls. But the biggest problem is the issue of open defecation. Not only does open defecation impact the aesthetics of India, it is also responsible for widespread bacterial infections that sicken or stunt hundreds of millions of Indians. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 68 percent of India’s water sources have fecal coliform bacteria, or bacteria from human feces, the result of defecation into water sources. This leads to diarrhea and a plethora of other illness, which can cause malnutrition in children, leaving them stunted for life. An estimated 33 percent of all the world’s stunted children are from India, according to United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

Despite these facts and figures, known to the Indian government and obvious to anyone who travels to India, there has been much embarrassment about acknowledging and confronting this problem, partially due to cultural factors and partially in order to project an image of a rapidly developing India throughout the world. Therefore, Modi broke a taboo of sorts when he spoke about the problem openly in public during his Independence Day speech in 2014:

Has it ever pained us that our mothers and sisters have to defecate in the open? Poor womenfolk of the village wait for the night; until darkness descends, they can’t go out to defecate. What bodily torture they must be feeling, how many diseases that act might engender. Can't we just make arrangements for toilets for the dignity of our mothers and sisters?

As Modi pointed out, defecation is not only a sanitation problem, but a social problem that impacts women in particular. Indian women do not wish to defecate in the open because that opens them up to harassment and embarrassment in rural areas.

According to the Economist, a decade ago, 55 percent of Indians practiced open defecation. Now, the figure is around 45 percent. Since Modi’s program began, this percentage has gone down to below 40 percent. This indicates a gentle but pronounced decline, partly due to government policies. Since the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan began, the government has exceeded its own expectations. It promised to build five million toilets in 2014-2015 and instead built 5.8 million with its budget of 170 million rupees ($25 million). However, it still has to improve its waste management capabilities, as even in urban areas, only 56.4 percent of wards have sewer networks. Cleaning toilets is also a big issue; many toilets don’t have anyone to clean them, which can cause health problems just as bad as those caused by open defecation. According to a status report on Swacch Bharat released earlier in 2016, 22.6 percent of villages and 8.6 percent of urban wards—urban administrative divisions—do not have anyone to clean community toilets used by locals.

Waste management is a touchy issue in India due to the cultural factors that encourage open defecation in the first place. The acts of manual labor and cleaning are associated with lower castes, and caste remains an important facet of life in rural India. As a result, the traditional job of keeping public spaces clean has been pushed onto people who have little other choice, and thus little incentive to do so. Many toilets are cleaned by hand by manual scavengers who are almost always from the dalit or so-called untouchable castes. As a result, toilets have acquired an unclean reputation across large swathes of rural India. According to several villagers interviewed by Bloomberg, “only dalits, the lowest Hindu caste, should be exposed to excrement in a closed space.” One said: “Feces don’t belong under the same roof as where we eat and sleep.” That this problem is unique to cultural mores in India and not a result of poverty is evidenced by the fact that only three percent of Bangladeshis and one percent of Chinese defecate in the open.

Yet things are slowly changing. In this sense, the Swachh Bharat campaign is a mild success. Regardless of cultural taboos, toilets still need to be built so people can use them once their attitudes change. In this, the government is right in building toilets regardless of attitudes. Additionally, India needs to improve its sewage network, increase career opportunities for dalits, and encourage people be more positive toward manual labor and cleaning their own toilets.

But to truly combat the issue, attitudes toward defecation need to change. The government has had moderate success in public affairs campaigns encouraging people to stop defecating in the open. Bollywood and the regional movie industries have also done their part, with immensely popular actors such as Amitabh Bachchan encouraging people to use toilets. Encouragingly, it is not uncommon now for women to refuse to marry men unless their houses contain toilets. Villages across India have formed committees to shame people for defecating in the open if caught and many walls in urban areas have large signs or pictures on them encouraging individuals not to relieve themselves against the wall.

There are many moderate and overwhelming successes to the government’s efforts, but few outright failures to the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Like many issues in India, the issue of open defecation and a cleaner public space seems to be headed in a generally positive trajectory, but slowly. The program is only two years into its projected five year mission. The goal is to eliminate open defecation by constructing toilets for households, eradicate manual scavenging, change people’s attitudes toward sanitation, and create awareness all across the country by October 2, 2019. While this is ambitious and unlikely, it does set a high bar. It is quite possible that enough toilets will be built by then but attitudes take longer to change.

However, with the increased development and education in rural areas, it is not unforeseeable that in a couple of decades, open defecation will be eradicated from India. While this seems like a long time, the Modi government has to its credit definitely sped it up and extended the process to even the most remote of areas through its campaign. This being India, attitudes and programs evolve slowly and there is little more the government could have done to change attitudes short of physically coercing people to sit on toilets. By most measures, therefore, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan has been a moderate success in its first two years.