Collection of data and tabulation on swachh Bharat abhiyan
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How is Swachh Bharat Mission succeeding?
THE HANS INDIA | Jul 18,2017 , 02:38 AM IST

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In 2014, the Prime Minister announced a goal of eliminating open defecation by 2019. Doing so would have required the slow pace of decline in open defecation to have accelerated, starting in 2014, by more than a multiple of 12.
This would have been three times as fast as the fastest five-year decline in open defecation ever recorded in any country. (That record decline, which some experts believe is overestimated, goes to the 17-percentage-point decline in Ethiopia, a country with a much smaller population than India’s, and which still has not eliminated open defecation altogether)
So, we should not be surprised that, now almost two-thirds of the way through the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), it appears very unlikely that open defecation will be eliminated by 2019. This was not a realistic goal in the first place.
But this does not necessarily imply that we should be disappointed. The diseases spread by open defecation in densely populated rural India are so threatening to the survival, health, and development of children that even a modest acceleration in decline of open defecation could represent a substantial improvement in well-being.
In fact, the best rural sanitation policy probably is not one that pretends an unachievable goal is achievable. A better policy would make serious plans that are both ambitious and realistic, strategising pragmatically to turn resources into feasible progress towards a hard problem.
Is that what we have? Has the SBM made meaningful progress towards accelerating the decline of open defecation? Nobody knows. SBM is not measuring open defecation. Nobody knows because there is no credible, independent survey that can offer a useful nationally representative estimate of the fraction of rural persons defecating in the open.
Indeed, there is not even a cross-sectional estimate for a point in time after the start of the SBM, let alone a consistently measured data series to assess the pace of decline. This is not to say that the government is not putting out numbers about sanitation. Indeed, data are collected, tabulated, and presented, but the resulting numbers do not teach us about the decline of open defecation.
One reason is that the government’s monitoring system does not track open defecation it tracks funds spent on latrine construction. For reasons we describe in our book, few people in villages want the pit latrines provided by the government, so in many cases funds spent on latrines do not result in functional latrines. Pits may never be dug and superstructures may turn into storage sheds or bathing areas.
VOICE
NEWS
ANALYSIS
HANS
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Home
News Analysis
How is Swachh Bharat Mission succeeding?
THE HANS INDIA | Jul 18,2017 , 02:38 AM IST

.
In 2014, the Prime Minister announced a goal of eliminating open defecation by 2019. Doing so would have required the slow pace of decline in open defecation to have accelerated, starting in 2014, by more than a multiple of 12.
This would have been three times as fast as the fastest five-year decline in open defecation ever recorded in any country. (That record decline, which some experts believe is overestimated, goes to the 17-percentage-point decline in Ethiopia, a country with a much smaller population than India’s, and which still has not eliminated open defecation altogether)
So, we should not be surprised that, now almost two-thirds of the way through the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), it appears very unlikely that open defecation will be eliminated by 2019. This was not a realistic goal in the first place.
But this does not necessarily imply that we should be disappointed. The diseases spread by open defecation in densely populated rural India are so threatening to the survival, health, and development of children that even a modest acceleration in decline of open defecation could represent a substantial improvement in well-being.
In fact, the best rural sanitation policy probably is not one that pretends an unachievable goal is achievable. A better policy would make serious plans that are both ambitious and realistic, strategising pragmatically to turn resources into feasible progress towards a hard problem.
Is that what we have? Has the SBM made meaningful progress towards accelerating the decline of open defecation? Nobody knows. SBM is not measuring open defecation. Nobody knows because there is no credible, independent survey that can offer a useful nationally representative estimate of the fraction of rural persons defecating in the open.
Indeed, there is not even a cross-sectional estimate for a point in time after the start of the SBM, let alone a consistently measured data series to assess the pace of decline. This is not to say that the government is not putting out numbers about sanitation. Indeed, data are collected, tabulated, and presented, but the resulting numbers do not teach us about the decline of open defecation.
One reason is that the government’s monitoring system does not track open defecation it tracks funds spent on latrine construction. For reasons we describe in our book, few people in villages want the pit latrines provided by the government, so in many cases funds spent on latrines do not result in functional latrines. Pits may never be dug and superstructures may turn into storage sheds or bathing areas.
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