Reportedly this amazing plan was launched on the gandhi Jayanti of 2014, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) has become synonymous with a cleaner and healthier India. Across the country, people are greeted with a synonymous jingle in the morning, “Swachh Bharat ka irada, irada kar liya humne, Desh se apne ye wada, ye wada kar liya humne”, as sanitation workers clean the streets and take out the trash from our houses. The journey to making a Swachh Bharat is long and filled with challenges, but we have come far from where we started.
Meanwhile the most resounding victory of the SBM is the significant reduction in open defecation across rural India. Initiated in 2014, the mission aimed to make india ODF by 2019, a goal that spurred an unprecedented toilet construction drive. As per the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, the number of people practicing open defecation in rural areas has fallen from 550 million to 320 million since the campaign’s inception.
Furthermore the SBM’s focus on toilet construction has led to a substantial increase in access to sanitation facilities, particularly in rural areas, where coverage was historically low. Data from the National Family health survey (NFHS) highlights this positive trend. The SBM has also spurred several initiatives aimed at improving waste management, both in rural and urban areas. The emphasis is on the principles of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, promoting the segregation of waste at source and the development of sustainable waste processing solutions. To further boost sanitation efforts in urban areas, the Ministry of Urban Development introduced Swachh Survekshan, an annual cleanliness survey of cities.
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