Swachh Bharat

When the Swachh Bharat Mission launched on 2 October 2014, roughly half of rural households had no toilet and around 55 crore people practised open defecation — a major driver of disease and, for women, a daily indignity and safety risk. In five years the rural mission built over 11 crore household toilets, and sanitation coverage rose from about 39% to India being declared Open Defecation Free in 2019.

Every toilet was geo-tagged and tracked in a real-time information system, and the mission was as much about behaviour change as construction — mobilising swachhagrahis, students and celebrities. Studies have linked the drive to lower infant mortality and disease. Phase II (2020-26) shifts focus to sustaining ODF status and managing solid and liquid waste, with over 5 lakh villages now ODF-Plus.

Swachh Bharat worked less like a construction scheme and more like a behaviour-change campaign. It combined subsidies to build household toilets with relentless publicity, community monitoring and local committees to make open defecation socially unacceptable — village by village declaring themselves open-defecation-free (ODF). In cities, the parallel push is on door-to-door waste collection and processing.

The scale is huge — over 11 crore household toilets built, and rural India declared broadly ODF, a shift linked to falling child mortality and disease. The harder, longer task is sustaining the change: keeping toilets in use with water and upkeep, and moving to the next frontier under SBM 2.0 — solid and liquid waste management, plastic waste, and truly clean towns rather than just toilet-equipped ones.

The harder, longer task is sustaining the change — keeping toilets in use with water and upkeep, and now extending the mission to solid and liquid waste management.

0 → ~12 crore household toilets (2014→2024). Rural sanitation ~39% → ~100%; ODF in 2019. 5 lakh+ villages ODF-Plus. Sources: Ministry of Jal Shakti (SBM-Grameen).