Swachh Bharat Mission: Half way down the road

Parameswaran Iyer, drinking water, sanitation ministry secy has set a pace, but real task starts now

Parameswaran Iyer is on a two-year contract with the government to achieve the incredible — ensuring a 100 per cent open defecation-free rural India by October 2, 2019. An IAS officer who took voluntary retirement in 2009, Iyer is back as the hand-picked secretary of the drinking water and sanitation ministry in charge of Swachh Bharat Mission’s (SBM’s) rural components and cross-ministry coordination.

The targets he is tasked to achieve can easily overwhelm. He has to ensure all 609,883 villages become open defecation-free (ODF) in two years. An estimated 171,806 claim to be ODF and of these 71,377 have been verified to be so — that is about 12 per cent of the target.

Take another target. His ministry is to build 70 million household toilets by 2019. The government says 18.2 million were built in 2016-17, and 12.6 million in the year before.

It’s clear Iyer has his task cut out, considering the work is to now pick speed in the poorer states with a low base to start with. And that could make or break Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship Swachh Bharat Abhiyan programme. But the man steering the programme is confident: “We are going to get into a geometric curve up from here on targets. It is behaviour change that is the key. The target for SBM-Rural is to achieve Open Defecation-Free India by October 2019 by focusing on behaviour change. Unless people are convinced and demand ODF, we will not get there. So, our focus on behaviour change will make the difference,” he says.

The government gives an incentive of Rs 12,000 per household toilet. It can cost anything between Rs 15,000-Rs 40,000. But Iyer knows that a real change is linked to so much more —income levels, land ownership, caste system, infrastructure and education. “There is little research to explain causality but for the government it’s clear, unless people participate the mission won’t be a success,” Iyer says.

Earlier, this civil servant had worked in Vietnam for the World Bank on water and sanitation. But he admits, the scale at which change needs to come in India is unmatched. Besides the scale, there are other peculiar challenges. How does one overcome the trenchant caste factor in the equation? There are low-cost technologies like the double pit system that Iyer advocates instead of taking on the caste problem directly. It turns excreta into useful plain compost before the pit is opened up in due time to be emptied.

But people still ask, who shall get into the pit to clean it, Iyer points out. He did once himself, along with his officers, to showcase what his officers have achieved. The small bottle of compost on his office table in Delhi is a memento he carried back from the pit.

“It is termed manual scavenging when there is fresh excreta. This is plain odourless compost.” Spreading such low-cost and appropriate technologies will be the key, he elaborates.

The public relations job to push the technology and ODF needs to be taken to the ground. He hopes the “swachhagrahis” — village level non-government workers — will help in the journey towards the ODF status. The government aspires to have half a million of them to create a public movement. These volunteers, Iyer believes, can be incentivised to convince villages to go ODF and to stay with it. The incentive to swachhagrahis is paid by the district administration and varies from state to state, usually on a performance basis. For example, in Tamil Nadu, an incentive of Rs 200 is given to motivators per household, and an incentive of Rs 5,000 when the village they are working in becomes ODF. In addition to the swachhagrahis, grassroots workers are also being mobilised to work on SBM.

The ministry is working to improve their skills as well, through better training. This, Iyer thinks, is more important than the mass media approach especially when water and sanitation are on the state subject list in the Constitution. In that scenario, the Union government’s central role turns to coordinating, cajoling, providing best practices and monitoring based on set standards.

But the scale and stiff targets require hard cash as well. When the government applied to the World Bank for a loan of $1.5 billlion to fund the SBM’s rural component, it estimated the total funding needed would be $22 billion (Rs 1.5 lakh crore), of which the Centre would contribute $15.4 billion (Rs 1.03 lakh crore) and the states $5.1 billion over five years. So far, the total allocations in 2015-18 from the Union government stand at Rs 31,152 crore. The ministry expects Rs 20,000-25,000 crore next year as central allocation. Iyer believes the needed resources could come through convergence of schemes such as MNREGA and CSR.

“Each ministry has been asked to carve out an expenditure for SBM from their respective budgets. This will happen from April. All ministries will contribute to the mission from their existing resources. Resources will not be a limitation,” Iyer says.

The drinking water and sanitation ministry is tasked with coordinating with all other ministries and departments in the government on SBM. However, the ministry of urban development is in charge of the urban component of the scheme. Iyer has got public sector units to fund the Prime Minister’s idea of developing 100 iconic tourism sites. To begin with, 10 iconic sites have been identified.

Alongside, Iyer’s ministry is working with the primary education department of the HRD ministry to see how maintenance funds can be provided for school toilets and with the health ministry to see how community health centres can contribute to the mission through the National Health Mission funds. Dovetailing and convergence could provide some extra muscle in achieving the tough goals. 

The biggest challenge for the mission however, would be to retain credibility as the targets light up on the government’s online dashboard. Slippage — the tendency of people to not use the toilets and revert to open defecation for various reasons — needs to be checked. The problem plagued previous government programmes on sanitation. Some independent assessments suggest that is also the case with the current attempt. There is no hard data from the government to assess it at the moment.

The scheme does not provide money for repair of old toilets that have fallen in disuse. It does try to ensure long-term use of new ones being built now. 

The World Bank loan mandates a third-party independent ground check of the figures — how many toilets to begin with, how many are built and how many actually used consistently. This independent survey and annual review are yet to start. Iyer suggests it could be in place in another six months. A baseline survey and an annual third party verification is essential for regular disbursements from the $1.5-billion loan which was cleared in December 2015. The mission has seen hectic action over two years. The next two years shall test the systems put in place to make states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand come on board. Iyer has to make each day count to ensure the government leads from the front. A civic movement, that the PM desires, can only follow at the speed the government sets.

Iyer is confident that another 200,000 villages will be on the ODF list by the time his two-year contract ends. “When the PM is passionate about a scheme and does regular stock-taking, the task becomes that much easier,” he says.