Relevance: GS Paper II (Development and Welfare)
Why has this issue cropped up?
India’s Swachh Bharat Mission is receiving global praise for attempting to close the sanitation gap of nearly 60% of the rural population not having access to a toilet at home in 2014.
Origin of Swachh movement
- The government invoked Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a clean and healthy country when it launched the ambitious programme.
- On the eve of Independence, Gandhi saw the lack of a “sense of national or social sanitation” as the root of all diseases among Indians.
- The govt. announced a Swachh movement in 2014 to change that, and four years later the outcomes show that achieving social change is far from easy.
Hurdles in the way of Swachh Bharat
- In some States, such as Rajasthan, MP and UP, the social change that the SBM hopes to achieve remains elusive, and traditionally oppressed communities continue to manually remove filth from dry latrines used by the upper castes.
- The Centre asserts that urban toilet coverage is now 87% of the target, and nearly three-fourths of the wards in the country have door-to-door collection of municipal waste, but the lived experience of the city-dweller, especially in the bigger metros, is different.
- Waste volumes continue to grow as economic growth spurs consumption.
- The laws on municipal solid waste, protection of water sources and pollution control are just not being enforced.
- The official machinery required to enforce legal provisions vigorously, and the infrastructure to manage waste scientifically are inadequate, making it unlikely that there will be significant public health outcomes flowing from high-profile cleaning campaigns.
Way forward
- There is a need for a close audit of the outcomes.
- Besides making sanitation a movement through the provision of well-designed toilets and behaviour change in rural India, the SBM should have a broader vision of what constitutes cleanliness.
- Besides ending manual scavenging, the Swachh Bharat Mission must ensure that the manual cleaning of septic tanks, which is killing so many workers each year, is stopped and that funds for rehabilitation reach them.
Conclusion
Without full commitment to the above aspects of development, there is little chance of meaningfully achieving the Sustainable Development Goals on water and sanitation anytime soon.
