Critically evaluate the performance of India’s most ambitious project Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) and examine its challenges.Refer – Live mint
IAS Parliament 7 years
KEY POINTS
· The core programme of SBM is to ensure usage of toilets in all homes through behaviour change, and, thereby, eliminate open defecation.
· Since October 2014, when the programme was launched, SBM has equipped 75 million households with toilets.
· At the time of its launch, fewer than 40% of households had toilets at home. Today that figure is up to over 85%.
· The number of open defecation-free (ODF) villages has gone up — about 65% of all villages in the country.
· Seventeen states and Union Territories (UTs) are now ODF. Of the remaining 16, another three are almost ODF (90%) and six are more than 85% ODF.
· 70% of the villages surveyed also had minimum litter or stagnant water.
· 50% of all urban wards have 100% door-to-door solid waste collection.
· A million schools now have separate toilets for girls.
· The behaviour change reflected in these statistics is fairly dramatic for a programme that started less than four years ago.
Significance of the programme
· The large majority of our citizens in rural India, especially the women, no longer have to suffer the indignity of having to go out into the open to defecate marks a sea change in their daily life.
· But, apart from the intrinsic value of enhancing the dignity of daily life, elimination of open defecation also has great instrumental value in enhancing health and economic well-being.
· The incidence of diarrhoea was significantly less in ODF villages compared to non-ODF villages and measures of under nutrition (stunting and wasting), were also significantly better in the ODF villages.
· An ODF village household is significantly gaining from savings in medical expenditure because of lower incidence of illness and less income loss due to fewer days of unpaid sick leave.
Challenges
· To sustain the changed rural sanitation behaviour.
· To bring out a more effective bureaucratic engagement for the implementation of the programme.
