Swachh Bharat Mission: Far From Making India Clean

Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken over the reins of the country, he has announced many initiatives that have caught the eyeballs of the media and common man alike and these initiatives have been touted as historical and slated to change the socio-economic culture of the country. Among the various pan-India initiatives started by the NDA government, some of those that have created a whole lot of buzz include Jan Dhan Yojana, Make in India, PM Bima Yojna and Digital India initiative. Along with these initiatives, the PM has also announced another leap into the country’s cleanliness drive with the much-hyped “Swachh Bharat Mission” (SBM) on October 2, 2014, coinciding with Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.

Though started with a bang and slated to make India totally open defecation free by 2019, it seems that this mission has lost steam; at least the country’s people think so. Recently a huge survey done by Local Circles revealed that just six states in the country have shown marked improvement in cleanliness while there wasn’t any or just marginal improvement in other parts of the country. While Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh have shown significant improvement, populous states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi and Haryana got quite a subdued response to this cleanliness derive. Apart from social mobilisation, this initiative hasn’t been able to provide any financial momentum to the the industrial segment related to cleanliness sectors like sanitary ware, tiles, plumbing solutions, etc.

When last year this initiative was announced, a target was set in urban India to construct 1.04 crore household toilets, 5 lakh community and public toilets seats, and 100 per cent door to door collection of solid waste and its managed transportation and disposal by 2019. Actually Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) had three components viz. construction of individual toilets, community and public toilets and municipal solid waste management. This is a quite an ambitious task in the hands of the government and certainly calls for overall participation of all the citizens of the country, private and public machinery and various state government organisations.

The first year of the SBM was not quite encouraging in terms of achievement as till September 4 just 4.64 lakh individual household toilets have been constructed across the country and this movement has been quite skewed towards BJP-run states like Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, constructing around 4.21 lakh toilets alone. Other states showed quite a subdued response to this mission. In terms of community toilets and public toilets also just 24,233 toilets have been constructed across the country. The third component of SBM i.e. municipal solid waste management has also shown a lukewarm response as only 31,590 wards out of 78,003 wards have put into place a door to door collection system, processing just 17.34 per cent waste. Considering this, the SBM clearly seems to be a laggard entity and all-round efforts are needed to make it a success.

On the rural India front the situation of SBM is even worse as, at the last count, there were 18.15 crore households in the country out of which 11.11 crore households didn’t have toilets facilities in the villages. As per a survey conducted by the government, 9.66 crore households were still not covered by this facility till September 2015, showing a mammoth task in the hands of the government and other related establishments. The bigger concern is that populous states like UP, Bihar and Maharashtra showed little improvement in terms of households toilets and a whopping 1.64 crore, 1.70 crore and 52 lakh households respectively are still not covered by this facility.

As per the data released by the government during August, the PM’s home state Gujarat has performed better than the rest of the country in the matter of constructing toilets and other BJP-led and NDA-ruled states like MP, Haryana, Chattisgarh, Punjab and Rajasthan have shown marked improvement. However, in bigger states where other parties are in power, there is hardly any progress in the overall SBM components. In fact, 10 states haven’t even started the process of solid waste management. Considering all this, the Swachh Bharat Mission certainly hasn’t taken off well till now and considering the targets set for up to 2019, the government machinery and the private sector should work together to make it a big success.