Swachh Bharat Mission: The Decision Behind India’s Cleanliness Movement

Launched on October 2, 2014, and covered briefly in our article on Modi’s first 100 days in office, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan became one of the largest sanitation infrastructure programmes ever undertaken. This article goes further, covering the scale of what was built, the official results claimed, and the significant gap independent surveys have found between official numbers and actual usage on the ground.

The Basic Mechanics

The mission’s core rural component offered a per-latrine construction subsidy of Rs 12,000, with the central government contributing Rs 7,200 of that amount and state governments covering the remainder, aimed at helping households that couldn’t otherwise afford to build a private toilet do so, alongside a public information campaign intended to shift long-standing open-defecation habits in areas where household toilets already existed but weren’t consistently used.

The Official Numbers

The government’s own figures, as reported in Scroll.in’s detailed assessment of the mission, claimed 9.2 crore rural toilets built as of February 2019, working toward an original target of 12 crore toilets by October 2, 2019, the mission’s five-year anniversary. By that measure, 28 of India’s 36 states and union territories were declared open defecation free, encompassing roughly 5.5 lakh individual villages, with the government’s own survey data claiming 95.6 percent of a sample of these declared-ODF villages remained free of open defecation.

Where Independent Surveys Found a Different Picture

Independent, non-government surveys examining the same question found a considerably less complete picture. According to Scroll.in’s reporting on these studies, roughly 23 percent of people who owned a toilet under the scheme continued to defecate in the open regardless, a usage gap rather than a construction gap, present even in officially ODF-declared areas. The state-level discrepancies were sometimes striking: Rajasthan, officially declared open defecation free, showed an independent survey finding open defecation rates as high as 53 percent, while Madhya Pradesh, also officially ODF, showed a 25 percent rate in the same kind of independent check.

Questions About the Verification Process Itself

Beyond the usage gap, the process used to verify ODF status itself drew scrutiny. Of villages the government had declared ODF as of February 2018, only 14.4 percent had actually completed the second, more thorough level of verification the government’s own guidelines called for, according to Scroll.in’s reporting, raising questions about how rigorously the earlier, faster round of ODF declarations had actually been checked. Separately, the government’s own National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey drew criticism for its sample size, surveying just 15 households in each of 6,136 villages nationally, a sampling approach some statisticians argued was too thin to reliably represent conditions across hundreds of millions of rural Indians.

Two Genuinely Different Ways to Read This Record

It’s possible to hold two things as true at once here. The scale of physical toilet construction under the mission was genuinely enormous by any global standard, representing one of the largest rural sanitation infrastructure pushes ever undertaken by any government. At the same time, the gap between “a toilet exists” and “open defecation has actually stopped,” documented specifically by independent surveys rather than merely alleged by critics, means the more ambitious claim, that India has become substantially open-defecation-free as a direct result of the mission, deserves real scepticism rather than being accepted at face value based on government-reported ODF declarations alone.

Why the Distinction Matters for Public Health

This distinction isn’t just a statistical technicality. Public health researchers have long argued that sanitation infrastructure only delivers its intended health benefits, reduced disease transmission, improved child nutrition outcomes, when it’s consistently used, not merely built, meaning the usage gap documented by independent surveys represents a meaningful shortfall against the mission’s underlying public health rationale, not simply an accounting dispute over how many toilets technically exist.

The Water Access Problem Behind Some of the Usage Gap

Part of the usage shortfall traces back to a more basic infrastructure problem: water availability. Reporting cited in Hindustan Times found that roughly 60 percent of toilets built under the mission lacked reliable water access, a serious practical barrier to consistent use in a country where water scarcity is already a significant challenge in many rural areas, since a toilet without a nearby, reliable water source is considerably harder to keep clean and usable day to day, a factor that plausibly explains at least some of the gap between toilets built and toilets actually used consistently.

The Mission’s Second Phase

Recognising these gaps, the government launched a second phase of the mission, Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0 and its rural counterpart, with an explicit shift in emphasis from new construction toward sustaining and improving what had already been built, including greater attention to solid and liquid waste management infrastructure alongside continued toilet access, an acknowledgment, at least implicitly, that the first phase’s primary achievement was construction at scale rather than a fully solved sanitation problem.

Bottom Line

Swachh Bharat Mission delivered a genuinely massive rural sanitation construction programme, but the government’s own headline ODF achievement claims have been significantly complicated by independent surveys finding real, ongoing open defecation even in officially declared areas, along with questions about how thoroughly some ODF declarations were actually verified before being announced.

FAQ

Abhyudaya Verma