Celebrating the unmentionable

The Swachh Bharat Revolution: Four Pillars of India's Behavioural Transformation

Parameswaran Iyer (Ed)

Harper Collins, Rs 699, 280 pages

The Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) “has become India’s sanitation revolution and one of the biggest behaviour change mass movements in history” writes Parameswaran Iyer, the man behind this movement and editor of  The Swachh Bharat Revolution. SBM has proved that “impossible is indeed nothing”. “Rules were broken” as Valerie Curtis, professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, puts it, and the team dared to tread “a path never travelled”. She goes on to state that “the discourse has changed to the extent that ornaments that look like ‘shit’ are now sold at gift shops”. The SBM revolution has already provided inspiration to many countries. Suleiman H Adamu, Nigeria's minister for water resources, admits that he was “awed and sold” and that “the Nigeria ODF [open defecation free] campaign is now being modelled on the same lines as SBM”. Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia, writes that “India stands out as an example for all of us” in the context of SBM. 

The essays and articles in the book reflect the interests and commitments of each section of society in “making it happen”. The introduction to the book written by the editor explains the “why” and “how” of the success of the scheme. Mr Iyer puts it succinctly: “A major contributor to the success of SBM has been the policy shift towards an outcome-oriented approach, as opposed to an output-oriented one.” The real challenge, however, was in weaning “people away from the habit of open defecation and therefore a behaviour change campaign”. 

What really made the difference was the approach Mr Iyer adopted.  He led from the front as the “team at the Ministry ... travelled extensively to different states to actively engage with and motivate all levels of state government officials to put SBM in mission-mode in their own domains”. The role played by primary schools in mass awareness about sanitation is recognised in the opening chapter.

Most of the essays and articles are written by those that were active participants in the movement. Thus Raghubar Das, chief minister of Jharkhand, who anchored the movement in the difficult terrain of his state confesses that the success of the scheme in the state could be attributed to “a demand-driven and community-centric approach” and he could do so “by investing a significant amount of … time in the programme”.

The article by Rajiv Mehrishi, Comptroller and Auditor General, reflects how the SBM team managed to engage with opinion makers and those who mattered to inculcate acceptance about an issue that could “hardly [be] a subject of regular dinner-table conversation”. Priyanka Shukla, district collector, Jashpur, Chhattisgarh, explains how they managed to implement what appeared at the start to be a difficult task through innovative measures. As she puts it, “The outcome has not resulted from fear or force but from sheer willingness to be a part of the change”.

Arun Jaitley, who was then finance minister, explained how “sometimes a big, hard, audacious goal set by a strong leader brings out the best in people and institutions”. This perhaps was the greater contribution of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who pushed all to come out of their “comfort zones” to achieve the “impossible”. He made them “think big and aim high”. This is  one of the most eloquently written articles in the book as the author goes on to explain how “the ‘unmentionable’ toilet has been placed at the forefront of India’s developmental and political discourse”. 

There could be doubts about the calculations made by UNICEF that “every rural family in an open defecation-free village in free India saves an average of Rs 50,000 per year” but no one questions the fact that “investments in sanitation deliver a high return”. World Bank’s regional vice-president Hartwig Schafer believes, like many others, that it was “about changing the mindsets and encouraging people”. The real challenge, as the UNICEF report clearly brings out, would be the “efforts… needed to sustain the intervention”.

There are articles by people such as Adil Zainulbhai, chairman, Quality Council of India, that quote surveys to prove that most (91.29 per cent) of the “households with access to toilets were also using them regularly”. 

Celebrities such as Amitabh Bachchan and Akshay Kumar had major roles to play in communicating with the masses and in making SBM into a mass movement. They also contribute by way of articles in the book. Amitabh Bachchan call it a “Jan Andolan” and Akshay Kumar converted reality to reel life in his block buster Toilet – Ek Prem Katha.

The book is a must-read especially for civil servants and all those who aspire to bring about transformation in their spheres of activity. The essays will help them understand the “how” of doing the “impossible”. 

The writer is a former Indian bureaucrat