Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) receives global praise' that was published in Newsband

India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) receives global praise

The NDA government invoked Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a clean and healthy country. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a Swachh movement in 2014. Four years later the outcomes show that achieving social change is far from easy.

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. The Centre asserts that urban toilet coverage is now 87% of the target,

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.

It would be even better if the latrine wastes are collected to produce compost. I think at present, everything goes to ocean. Even wastes from hospitals goes to ocean with all the bacterias of different human diseases that can contaminate sea animals and plants. Morally speaking, sending dirt to sea is not a right action.

There are two aspects to cleaning India. One is improving the infrastructure (toilers, water, dustbin, garbage collection & waste processing) and other is the changing the attitude and behavioral pattern of the public. The second aspect will come only through education and may take as much as a generation or two decades of time. A case in example is all of us get very critical of the government and municipalities when flooding happens after rains, due to clogged storm water drains but hardly ever take people to task for throwing garbage into the drainage. What SBM has achieved is to raise awareness about the need for cleanliness as it is fundamental to having hygienic environment and good health. What Modi has done is to bring focus. What has not been achieved in past 70 years cannot be undone in 4 years.

SBM has definitely driven people and made them more aware on cleanliness. The naysayers will point to the deficiency but the biggest PLUS is the awareness and readiness of people to accept that they have to change for making the country a clean liveable place. As for the practice of manual scavenging and cleaning by particular castes greater social malaise needs to be tackled with a new and stringent approach.

The achievements made in SBM so far is phenomenal, in comparison with the past performance of earlier governments.

The undeniable fact is that cleanliness campaign has led to a significant awareness among the citizens and they are willing to and are making changes. Urban local bodies (ULBs) do fear complaints under SBM and attend to them quickly. It is a fact that open defecation has largely been eliminated not only in urban but also in rural areas. That is a crowning achievement of the SBM.