Swachh Bharat - A Step towards realising Mahatma's Dream

This article written by Dr.Mahendra Babu Kuruva attempts to throw light upon the teachings and experiences of Mahatma Gandhi regarding cleanliness and sanitation in India and explains how it inspired today’s Swachh Bharat Mission that achieved commendable progress since its inception.

Hyderabad: India remembers Gandhi Ji as a part of the celebrations marking his 150th Birth year. While Gandhi Ji's mark on India’s history, as a crusader of India’s independence is indelible, his thoughts and ideology regarding sanitation and cleanliness hold good even today and offer deeper insights into the problem that India has been facing since decades. This article attempts to throw light upon the teachings and experiences of Gandhiji regarding cleanliness and sanitation in India and explains how it inspired today’s Swacch Bharat Mission that achieved commendable progress since its inception.

The Mahatma’s Trio:

Gandhi Ji has been a pioneer of promoting cleanliness in India and highlighted the interconnectedness between the trio- cleanliness, untouchability and national autonomy. It is in this context, Gandhi Ji once said that “Everyone must be his own scavenger”. This statement reveals his zeal not only to make cleanliness a personal responsibility but also to remove untouchability. He was not a man of mere words but actions. There are many instances where he demonstrated his exemplary standards of probity in promoting cleanliness in India. One incident is worth remembering in this context. When Gandhi Ji was in South Africa, he once visited India to attend the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and plead the cause of ill-treatment given to Indians in South Africa. It was during this time he witnessed the horrible sanitary conditions at the Congress camp and when he asked the volunteers there to clean the mess, they responded by saying that it was a “sweeper’s job”.

Gandhi Ji, who was in a western outfit at that time took the broom and cleaned the premises, to the astonishment of the congress cadre present there at that time. And after his return to India and subsequent rise to the level of a father figure in the Congress party, the volunteers of the same party formed “bhangi” groups. Sweepers are called by this name and they normally belong to marginalised classes of the society. However, with the call of Gandhi Ji, even the upper caste people came and joined him in these groups to take up the cleaning work in different parts of the country. Such is the commitment and influence of Mahatma towards cleanliness and his vigor to eradicate the social taboo related to scavenging and the people related to it. This vision of him later became the guiding light towards attaining eradication of untouchability in Independent India to a great extent.

This concern of Gandhi, regarding sanitation, both in public and private had its roots in his Satyagraha campaign in South Africa. At that time his primary focus was to eradicate the negative image created by the white settlers in South Africa, that Indians need to be segregated and kept separately, as they lacked personal hygiene. In protest of this widespread notion, Gandhi Ji wrote an open letter to the National Legislative Assembly, stating that Indians are capable of maintaining hygiene standards equivalent to their European counterparts, given the same opportunity and attention by the Government. On the other hand, he campaigned vigorously to promote hygiene among Indians in South Africa and also back in India. Gandhi Ji even went to the extent to state that “a lavatory must be as clean as a drawing-room” in one his speeches in Madras. This is because he had a strong conviction that, it is very important for Indians to have high standards of sanitation and personal hygiene, to eradicate untouchability and to get rid of the notion of the West about India, that it needs to be civilized by foreigners.

It was this conviction that grew stronger in the later period, particularly when Gandhi Ji was on a mission mode during the non-cooperation movement in the early 1920s. He reiterated the closely knitted relationship between cleanliness and Swaraj. In one of his articles titled, “Our insanitation”, he stated that “Swaraj can only be had by clean, brave people”. According to him, the cleanliness drive among the citizens is a key to bring in a free and casteless society. By connecting the issues of untouchability and cleanliness with freedom and Swaraj, Gandhi Ji had given a new lease of life to the discourse on the status of manual scavenging, their status in the society and the subsequent social stigma associated with them through ‘untouchability’.Gandhi wanted to see an India, not only free from the colonial rule but also dreamt of a clean India, free from social discrimination against its citizens, due to the sheer nature of work one does for their daily living. However, Mahatma did not live long after India gained independence and the successive governments thereafter, unfortunately, did not focus on cleanliness and sanitation at the policy level.

Swachh Bharat: A Mission of Cleanliness

As a result of this policy indifference over a period of time, India stood low on cleanliness standards. According to the 2011 census data, out of 246.7 million households in India, 53.1 percent of them had no facility of the washroom on their house premises. While a very minuscule number of them used public latrines, a large majority of this category defecate in open, which is an astonishing figure for a fast-growing economy like India. The National Democratic Alliance that came to power in 2014 under the Prime Ministership of Narendra Modi identified the magnitude of the problem and decided to address it on war footing mode. Commemorating the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, Mr.Modi launched one of the flagship programmes of NDA Government and in fact the most ambitious cleanliness drive in India’s history in the name of ‘Swach Bharath Mission’ on 2nd October 2014. The broader aim of this campaign is to provide sanitation facilities to every family, including toilets, solid and liquid waste disposal systems, village cleanliness, and safe and adequate drinking water supply. The mission started with a laudable objective of ending open defecation completely by the year 2019, which would mark the 150th anniversary of the Mahatma and is making strides in achieving a cleaner India than before.

Nearly 10 crore households’ toilets were built in the country, leading to a significant improvement in sanitation coverage and reduction in open defecation, since the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission on October 2, 2014. When Prime Minister Modi visited the United States in the last week of September 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation honoured the success of Swachh Bharat that has transformed lives around the country. The statement by the foundation, saying that "The Swachh Bharat mission can serve as a model for other countries around the world that urgently need to improve access to sanitation for the world's poorest” depicts its progress and importance.

Challenges ahead for Swachh​​​​​​​ Bharat:

Despite the significant achievements, this mission had achieved, challenges persist to realize Gandhi Ji's dreams. The major challenge is manual scavenging. To address this issue, the Government needs to focus its energy and resources on building toilets in such a design that will not necessitate manual scavenging and ensuring their maintenance. The second challenge is to address the concerns about the productivity of funds utilized in the campaign process. It is pertinent that necessary supervisory mechanisms are put in place to ensure that the funds allocated are put to productive use and procedural delays are avoided to serve the larger purpose of making India cleaner than before. The third challenge is to overcome social taboos to use toilets. Perseverance in efforts and ingenuity in the ways one approaches the people would bring in major changes on this front, by ensuring public participation through awareness. Hence by filling the loopholes and with the commitment of the Government and the cooperation of civil society, it is possible to see a clean India that Mahatma Gandhi had dreamt of.

Article By- Dr.Mahendra Babu Kuruva