Swachha Bharat Abhiyan Success and Failure
Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Swachha Bharat Abhiyan on Gandhiji's 145th birth anniversary, April 2, 2014. This mission seeks to make India cleaner while fulfilling his dreams.
It's an excellent initiative designed to eliminate open defecation and raise awareness about cleanliness. In doing so, healthcare costs and mortality rates decrease substantially.
1. Sanitation
Sanitation initiatives may well be one of the most crucial development initiatives. Poor sanitation is one of the primary causes of disease and death worldwide, leading to spiraling health care costs for households, lost productivity and wasted food - India holds the dubious distinction of being home to one of the highest rates of open defecation globally with potentially serious repercussions for public health and undernutrition.
Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Movement) has broken this taboo and inspired millions of people to build toilets and practice safe sanitation practices. Its success stems from disrupting institutional norms, high level political commitment and leadership, using technology and data, as well as its focus on behavior change.
Many experts applauded this program but cautioned the government against solely relying on building toilets as the solution to poor sanitation issues. Instead, sustainable and affordable sanitation systems must be put in place as part of this initiative.
SBM is currently working on the second phase of their program: Fecal Sludge Management and Safe Sanitation Technology. They must tackle both remote households that have not been reached before as well as offering sanitation options to urban poor families in order to keep gains they have made going forward.
India has had difficulty meeting previous Total Sanitation Campaign goals due to lack of political attention, leadership and subsidies mismanagement; inadequate monitoring systems; and top-down supply-led approaches. These factors all played a part in its poor performance in previous TSCs. The Swachh Bharat Mission has successfully tackled these challenges through technology, publicizing its success, encouraging behavioral change and devising innovative business models for toilet construction such as subsidy payments through mobile phones or the formation of self-help groups for installation. As part of its outreach efforts, Swachh Bharat Mission has also striven to better the lives of manual scavengers and waste workers by offering dignified livelihoods that include them as part of its outreach efforts. This success should be celebrated and built upon.
2. Cleanliness
After decades of independence, India had struggled to maintain a clean and sustainable environment. Streets, parks, markets, beaches, rivers were polluted beyond use - one holy river such as Ganges had become an incubator of waterborne diseases that could spread throughout its course.
On October 2, 2014, India's government initiated the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan to improve conditions. This nationwide campaign sought to make India a "clean nation".
The Swachh Bharat mission is an ambitious initiative designed to create a cleaner India. Its goals include making India open defecation-free, providing toilets for every household, teaching children about sanitation and hygiene practices, and increasing citizen awareness about why we must keep our surroundings tidy.
Since its launch, the Swachh Bharat mission has made significant strides forward. With the goal of having toilets installed in every household by 2022, nearly 9 crore toilets have already been constructed through this project.
Although the Swachh Bharat mission has made strides toward improved access to sanitation, more work needs to be done. One major issue is that people don't use their toilets. Many still defecate in public and don't make use of public facilities that have been built.
Another concern with the Swachh Bharat mission is its failure to address essential issues like manual scavenging. This dangerous job forces workers into maintenance holes for minimum wages - neither healthy for themselves nor the environment.
Cleanliness is essential to living healthy lives, as well as for businesses to operate effectively and efficiently. An unclean business may suffer customers loss as well as reputational damage. When looking for a cleaning company in Delhi, be sure to choose one which uses environmentally friendly cleaning methods and will help minimize environmental impact while increasing customer retention and revenue growth. Likewise, look for one offering professional services at competitive rates.
3. Health
While aspiring politicians and self-proclaimed social activists may take to the streets holding brooms for photo opps, it is imperative they fully appreciate the health implications of unsafe sanitation practices. Open defecation causes diarrhoea and intestinal worm infestation leading to protein energy malnutrition in children which impairs growth and development. Rural populations must become aware of the relationship between sanitation and health - movies like Toilet: Ek Prem Katha featuring popular country actors must be widely shown as part of an educational initiative.
Swachha Bharat Abhiyan's first phase, between 2014 and 2019, sought to achieve open defecation-free India by 2 October 2019 - Mahatma Gandhi's 150th birth anniversary. To this end, its objectives included building toilets, ending manual scavenging practices, creating awareness regarding sanitation matters, and driving behavioral changes related to sanitation practices.
4. Environment
Cleanliness is of utmost importance in any developing nation like India for reasons including health, social standard and tourism promotion. Therefore, the whole nation needs to take up this task together in order to make India clean. In order to do just this, on October 2, 2014 at Raj-path in New Delhi Mr Narendra Modi launched a campaign called Swachh Bharat Abhiyan with the objective of ending open defecation across India while providing basic sanitation facilities such as toilets, solid and liquid waste disposal systems as well as safe drinking water supply to every citizen across India.
This campaign has been extremely effective, helping change people's attitudes toward cleanliness. Not only is the campaign promoting cleanliness; but also encourages common people to get involved with cleaning up localities and public places. This government initiative reminds all citizens that keeping their surroundings tidy is their responsibility.
Mission Zero's targets to become open defecation free and provide basic sanitation facilities to every village and hamlet remain difficult to achieve. One major barrier lies within India itself - with certain regions much further from achieving state-level targets than others, independent surveys revealing that many rural Indians without toilet access do not use them on a regular basis; coercion and behavioral change strategies being deployed against this obstacle but it remains uncertain whether this Government can achieve their goals.
The challenge ahead for government and industry is shifting away from an obsession with managing fecal sludge towards more transformative measures, such as wastewater treatment, segregating garbage for recycling purposes and reducing single-use plastics consumption, bioremediating legacy dump sites and bioremediating legacy dump sites. Here the private sector may play an invaluable role.
