Swachh Bharat Mission

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan
स्वच्छ भारत अभियान

File:Swachh Bharat Abhiyan logo.jpg
Date	2 October 2014
Location	New Delhi, India
Organised by	Narendra Modi Government of India
Website	Official website

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Template:Lang-en) is a national campaign by the Government of India, covering 4041 statutory towns, to clean the streets, roads and infrastructure of the country.

This campaign was officially launched on 2 October 2014 at Rajghat, New Delhi, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself cleaned the road.It was a remembrance to Gandhi's words.It is India's biggest ever cleanliness drive and 3 million government employees and school and college students of India participated in this event. The mission was started by Prime Minister Modi, who nominated nine famous personalities for the campaign, and they took up the challenge and nominated nine more people and so on (like the branching of a tree). It has been carried forward since then with people from all walks of life joining it.

History

The components of the programme as listed in the SBM guidelines are:

• Construction of individual sanitary toilets (mostly pit latrines) for households below the poverty line with subsidy (80%) where demand exists.
• Conversion of dry latrines (pit latrines without a water seal) into low-cost sanitary latrines.
• Construction of exclusive village sanitary complexes for women providing facilities for hand pumping, bathing, sanitation and washing on a selective basis where there is not adequate land or space within houses and where village panchayats are willing to maintain the facilities.
• Setting up of sanitary marts.
• Total sanitation of villages through the construction of drains, soakage pits, solid and liquid waste disposal.
• Intensive campaign for awareness generation and health education to create a felt need for personal, household and environmental sanitation facilities.
• End of manual scavenging of garbage.

With effect from 1 April 1999, the Government of India restructured the Comprehensive Rural Sanitation Programme and launched the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC).

To give a fillip to the Total Sanitation Campaign, effective June 2003 the government launched an incentive scheme in the form of an award for total sanitation coverage, maintenance of a clean environment and open defecation-free panchayat villages, blocks and districts called Nirmal Gram Puraskar.

Effective 1 April 2012, the TSC was renamed to Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA).

On 2 October 2014 the campaign was relaunched as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.

Objectives

This campaign aims to accomplish the vision of a 'Clean India' by 2 October 2019, the 150th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. It is expected to cost over ₹62,000 crore (US$7.3 billion).

Specific objectives are:

• Elimination of open defecation
• Conversion of unsanitary toilets to pour flush toilets (a type of pit latrine, usually connected to two pits)
• Eradication of manual scavenging
• 100% collection and processing/disposal/reuse/recycling of municipal solid waste
• A behavioural change in people regarding healthy sanitation practices
• Generation of awareness among citizens about sanitation and its linkages with public health
• Supporting urban local bodies in designing, executing and operating waste disposal systems
• Facilitating private-sector participation in capital expenditure and operation and maintenance costs for sanitary facilities.

Nominees

Modi selected 9 public figures to propagate this campaign. They are:

• Sachin Tendulkar
• Baba Ramdev
• Kamal Haasan
• Mridula Sinha
• Priyanka Chopra
• Anil Ambani
• Salman Khan
• Shashi Tharoor
• Kapil Sharma(comedian)

• and The team of the TV series Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah

Manisha Koirala at Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in November 2014

Indian film actor Aamir Khan supported and encouraged this initiative and said that he would be happy if he is invited into this campaign. Urban Development Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu picked up a broom to help clean the cyclone-hit port city of Visakhapatnam in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, as part of the cleanliness campaign.

Brand ambassadors

Venkaiah Naidu listed brand ambassadors in various fields:

• Pawan Kalyan
• S. P. Balasubrahmanyam
• Amala (actress)
• K. Kavitha
• Gunupati Venkata Krishna Reddy
• Suddala Ashok Teja
• Pullela Gopichand
• Humpy Koneru
• Galla Jayadev
• Nithin
• V. V. S. Laxman
• J. Rameshwar Rao
• Shivlal Yadav
• B. V. R. Mohan Reddy
• Lakshmi Manchu

On 25 December 2014, Prime Minister Modi nominated nine people including

• Comedian Kapil Sharma,
• Former captain of Indian cricket team Sourav Ganguly
• Former IPS officer Kiran Bedi for taking forward his 'Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan'.
• Padmanabha Acharya, Nagaland Governor
• Sonal Mansingh, classical dancer
• Ramoji Rao of Eenadu group
• Aroon Purie of the India Today group.

He also nominated some organisations, including the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, Eenadu and India Today besides 'dabbewale' of Mumbai, who deliver home-made food to lakhs of people in the city.

On 8 November 2014, Modi carried the message to Uttar Pradesh and nominated another set of nine people for the state.

• Akhilesh Yadav
• Swami Rambhadracharya
• Manoj Tiwari
• Mohammad Kaif
• Deviprasad Dwivedi
• Raju Srivastava
• Suresh Raina
• Kailash Kher

More than 3 million government employees and school and college students are to participate in the drive.

Swachh Bharat Run

A Swachh Bharat Run was organized at the Rashtrapati Bhavan on 2 October 2014. According to a statement from the Rashtrapati Bhavan around 1500 people participated and the event was flagged off by President Pranab Mukherjee. Participants in the run included officers and their families.

Swachh Bharat apps

app developers came up with ideas named praneeth duley to support the mission using mobile technologies. The Times of India published an article on how "Desi companies beat Facebook in 'Swachh' apps race". Vocativ wrote of one such app that it could chuange the relationship between government and people.

Real-time monitoring

The government will be launching a nationwide real-time monitoring system for toilets constructed under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. For this the government of India is bringing awareness among the people through quite good advertisements . With this system, the government aims to attain a 100% open defecation free India by 2019.

Swachh Bharat short film

NIT Rourkela PhD students and Sacred Heart School Students,Tumkur have made a short film on Swachh Bharat, conveying the message that Swachh Bharat is not a one-day event but should be part of life, in order for the goal of a clean India to be achieved.

The Indo Nepal Doctors Association has also taken inspiration from the Prime Minister of India and on 3 January 2015 launched Swachh Bharat Nepal - Swasth Bharat Nepal Abhiyan at the Indo-Nepali border region of Sunauli-Belihiya, which is the entry to the birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini, Nepal.

Construction of toilets

Construction of toilets is one aspect of the Swachh Bharat programme. The programme aims to make India "open defecation free" by 2019. A village is declared "open defecation free" if each household in the village has a fly-proof toilet and safe septage disposal system and every member of the household has access to a toilet and 100% usage of the toilet, according to the guideline issued by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS). The village should also have no openly visible faeces, have properly used toilets in its schools and Anganwadi centres with safe confinement of the excreta.

The program plans to construct 12 crore toilets in rural India by October 2019, at a projected cost of ₹1.96 lakh crore (US$23 billion). Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of the need for toilets in his 2014 Independence Day speech stating, "Has it ever pained us that our mothers and sisters have to defecate in open? Poor womenfolk of the village wait for the night; until darkness descends, they can`t go out to defecate. What bodily torture they must be feeling, how many diseases that act might engender. Can't we just make arrangements for toilets for the dignity of our mothers and sisters?" Modi also spoke of the need for toilets in schools during the campaign for 2014 Jammu and Kashmir state elections stating, "When the girl student reaches the age where she realises this [lack of female toilets in the school] she leaves her education midway. As they leave their education midway they remain uneducated. Our daughters must also get equal chance to quality education. After 60 years of independence there should have been separate toilets for girl students in every school. But for the past 60 years they could not provide separate toilets to girls and as result the female students had to leave their education midway."

The Government is conducting the scheme in concurrence with the Indira Awaas Yojana, a rural housing scheme. Although, the Swachh Bharat programme began on 2 October 2014, the government had begun constructing toilets prior to that date. In the 12th Five Year plan (2012–17), the previous UPA government allocated ₹37,159 crore (US$4.3 billion) for rural sanitation under its Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan scheme. The UPA used ₹4,724 crore (US$550 million) of allocated funds, leaving the Modi government with ₹32,435 crore (US$3.8 billion). The programme has also received funding and technical support from the World Bank, corporations as part of corporate social responsibility initiatives, and by state governments under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan schemes. As of May 2015, 14 companies including Tata Consulting Services, Mahindra Group and Rotary International have pledged to construct 3,195 new toilets. As of the same month, 71 Public Sector Undertakings in India supported the construction of 86,781 new toilets.

Between April 2014 and January 2015, 31.83 lakh toilets were built. Karnataka led all States in construction of toilets under the programme, while Punjab built the least. As of August 2015, 80 lakh toilets have been constructed under the program.

Criticism

Criticisms of the campaign include:

Some regard the motives of Prime Minister Modi as purely political. The prime minister nominated people who were supposed to do some cleaning-up. They would then nominate others, and so slowly the whole of India would be involved. Thus, anyone seeing a participant in the scheme, especially a celebrity, would inevitably link their actions to Modi, building up his reputation.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan is not a new programme. Launched in 1986 as the Central Rural Sanitation Programme, the scheme later became the Total Sanitation Campaign (1999) and Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (2012). Some regard it as merely a renaming.

There has been a problem of corruption in delivery of facilities such as toilets and latrines since the launch of the Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) 1986. In rural areas BDOs, GP president, secretaries, and others take bribes from poor Indians to provide them, and the poorest are unable to obtain them because they cannot afford the bribes.

The NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India Aayog), formerly called the Planning Commission, is accused of preparing the guidelines of the scheme based on false reports through upward communication from people on-site such as BDO, GP presidents and secretaries; the Chairman, Deputy Chairman and the other members of the Planning Commission are accused of not checking the information by visiting the villages and physically seeing and talking with the beneficiaries face to face.

The central government is said to be irresponsible in not ensuring that the toilets, latrines, etc. are delivered, as the Ministry of Panchayati Raj closes grievance cases by transferring them to the state government, and never examines the details of whether the state government settles them correctly

See also

• Bharat Sarkar
• Digital India
• India.gov.in
• My Gov

External links

Media related to Swachh Bharat Abhiyan at Wikimedia Commons