User:Ia987/Swachh Bharat Mission

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Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India Mission is a country-wide campaign initiated by the Government of India in 2014 to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management. The program also aims to increase awareness of menstrual health management *CITE*. It is a restructured version of the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan launched in 2009 that failed to achieve its intended targets.

Phase 1 of the Swachh Bharat Mission lasted till October 2019.

Phase 2 is being implemented between 2020–21 and 2024–25 to help cement the work of Phase 1.

The mission was split into two: rural and urban. In rural areas "SBM - Gramin" was financed and monitored through the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (since converted to the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation under the Ministry of Jal Shakti) whereas "SBM - urban" was overseen by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. The rural division has a five-tier mechanism: central, state, district, block panchayat, and gram panchayat.

Background[edit]
See also: Sanitation in India

In 2011, the Census revealed that sanitation coverage as measured by the number of households owning toilets was just 34 per cent in rural India. An estimated 600 million people defecated in the open, the highest of any country in the world. Coverage about open defecation and contamination of drinking and bathing water in India prompted the government to take measures to deal with the problem.

Previous sanitation campaigns[edit]
Since India's independence in 1947, there have been three rural sanitation intervention attempts prior to Swachh Bharat Mission: the Central Rural Sanitation Programme, the Total Sanitation Campaign, and the Normal Bharat Abhiyaan. The first formal sanitation programme was launched in 1954 as an extension of the First Five Year Plan of the Government of India. In 1982, national sanitation coverage was just 2%. This was followed by the launch of the Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) in 1986. These were directed towards the construction of toilets; no behavioral change campaign was carried out, and this supply-based approach did not result in broader social transformation. The CRSP aimed to improve quality of life for rural people and emphasized helping rural women with privacy and dignity. Sanitation increased marginally by 9%. These were construction-led and achieved very little. The Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) was started in 1999. '''The TSC focused on increasing awareness around rural sanitation and informed rural populations about sanitation options specific to their living conditions. The Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (extension of TSC) was enacted''' in 2009 to generate demand for sanitation, linked to subsidy payments for the construction of toilets by families living below the poverty line. '''The program focused on community-led strategies and helped households, village schools, and community centers. TSC and Normal Bharat Yojana used the Pachayati Raj institutions for social mobilization.'''

A limited randomized study of eighty villages in rural (Madhya Pradesh) showed that the TSC programme did modestly increase the number of households with latrines, and had a small effect in reducing open defecation. Of the 138.2 million rural households in India (a 2001 figure), nearly 3.5 million constructed toilets. However, there was no improvement in the health of children." The earlier "Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan" rural sanitation program was hampered by the unrealistic approach. Lack of strong political will, lack of political leadership and lack of behavior change approach among the people also contributed to the failure of the projects. Consequently, Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was restructured by Cabinet approval on 24 September 2014 as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.

Selected public figures and brand ambassadors[edit]
One of the posters from cartoon based campaign by MCG drawn by the Cartoonist Shekhar Gurera More than three million government employees, 12 crore school and college students, 6.25 lakh volunteers, 2.5 lakh panchayat leaders, lakhs of public and 50 celebrities are participating in this movement.

The Prime Minister himself has been the chief communicator of this scheme. He wrote a letter to all 250,000 village president all over the country and encouraging them to reach out to people in their villages for sanitation services.

'''The rural division of the program is a top-down campaign *CITE*. Initially, the program was supposed to educate rural people about hygiene and encourage them to make better sanitation choices. High profile performances by celebrities and politicians sweeping the streets to promote Clean India, ignored the serious, unclean work required to maintain the program's latrines (such as manhole cleaning) **CITE**. The high profile celebrities associated with the campaign did little to encourage sanitary practices among rural people.'''

Components[edit]
The core objectives of the first phase of the mission were to reduce open defecation and improve management of municipal solid waste in both urban and rural areas.[citation needed] Elimination of open defecation was to be achieved through construction of individual household level toilets (often twin pit pour flush pit latrines), toilets and public toilets. For improving solid waste management, cities were encouraged to prepare detailed project reports that are bankable and have a financial model. '''The goal was to assume a "community-led total sanitation" approach to educate people; critics point out, however, that in the actual implementation, organizers used shaming tactics (to dissuade people from openly defecating) instead of providing respectful education. '''

The second phase on the other hand focuses on sustaining gains of the first phase and improving management of the solid and liquid wastes.

Impacts[edit]
Sunita Devi, who was inspired by the campaign, won the Nari Shakti Puraskar award in 2019 for constructing toilets in her village in Jharkhand.

According to the dashboards maintained by respective ministries, more than 100 million individual household level toilets have been constructed in rural areas, and 6 million household toilets in urban areas. In addition, nearly 6 million community and public toilets have also been constructed in the urban areas. Consequently, 4,234 cities and more than 600,000 villages across the country have declared themselves open defecation free (ODF).

More than 81.5 thousand wards in urban areas now have 100% door to door collection of solid waste and nearly 65 thousand wards practice 100% segregation of waste at source. Of the nearly 150 thousand metric tonnes of solid waste generated in urban areas, 65% is being processed.[citation needed]

An independent survey released by Quality Council of India in August 2017, reported that overall national rural "household access to toilet" coverage increased to 62.5%, and usage of toilets to 91.3%. Haryana topped the national ranking with 99% of households in rural areas covered and usage of toilets at 100%. According to UNICEF, the number of people without a toilet reduced from 550 million to 50 million. The World Bank reports that 96% of Indians who have a toilet use it. The World Health Organization (WHO) has in its report stated that at least 180,000 diarrhoeal deaths were averted in rural India since the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission. According to a survey carried out in 2018 and published in 2019 by National Statistical Office (NSO), 71% of rural households had access to toilets as of 2018. Though this disagreed with the Indian government's claim in 2019 that 95% of rural households had access to toilets, NSO's numbers still indicated a significant improvement over the situation during the previous survey period in 2012, when only 40% of rural households had access to toilets.

A study by Ashoka University concluded that the construction of toilets under the program led to a reduction in incidents of sexual assault against women. '''Toilet access for women has proven to reduce rates of sexual assault *CITE*. Although the SBM itself describes its goal in patriarchal terms, as ‘preserving the dignity of women’, scholars note the incidental benefit of reducing violence against women: between 2014-2016, studies estimate sexual assault against women fell by 25 incident per million because of access to toilets.'''

Data from the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) demonstrate the increase in access to improved sanitation due to SBM. Post 2015, 3.4% households gained access to better sanitation as compared to just 1.5% earlier