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The Swachh Bharat Mission was launched with great fanfare exactly a decade ago. A little earlier, on August 15, 2014, the Prime Minister had lent his voice to this neglected cause from the ramparts of the Red Fort. A tsunami of enthusiasm reverberated through the community of those stressing the importance of sanitation for the country’s development.
The first niggling sense of disquiet arose with the announcement of a target of achieving an open defecation free rural India in five years. Targets announced from above always invite a fear of target-driven implementation. Sanitation could again, as so often in the past, end up as a story of toilet construction, creating a landscape dotted with unused toilets for lack of the behaviour change at community level which alone can deliver the benefits of sanitation as a public good.
A year later, the abrupt departure of the Secretary of the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Government of India, suspiciously close to the leaked reports of a survey that showed less than promising results after one year of the Swachh Bharat Mission, was another sign that there may be little appetite for listening to news from the ground in order to initiate course correction. The leaked reports appeared to show a spurt in toilet construction but without any improvement in behaviour change.
In the years that followed, the tenor of reporting changed dramatically. It was marked by a phase in which all sanitation news seemed to enter an upward spiral of positivity! Large scale toilet construction and adoption was being reported across rural India. The Secretary of the Department became a regular contributor to the op ed pages of daily newspapers to show case the momentum and change in different states and districts of the country. It seems that the safe confinement of human excreta would soon be a norm that would translate into improved health and nutrition status for India’s rural poor. Official surveys and statistics backed this narrative and rural India was duly declared to be open defection free on target on October 2, 2019.
Is this really the case? Anecdotal evidence and the only credible data contained in the National Family Health Surveys would appear to show that the situation is not so promising. Toilet construction, as many feared, has not been accompanied by the necessary behaviour change at community level. Specially in the states with the more dismal figures of human development, this has shown a greater lag. Single pit toilets predominate and it is difficult to assess how rapidly they will fill up and begin to contaminate ground water or fall into disuse. Malnutrition figures are actually trending higher, hinting that the touted success on the sanitation front may well ring follow.
No country can progress without a proper analysis of its situation. Declaring victory and hiding the bad news can at best create a mirage. It is time we woke up and permitted credible data generation, so that we really know where we are.
Deepak Sanan in former India country team leader for water and sanitation, World Bank
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth