Swachh Bharat Mission


Swachh Bharat Mission, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan or Clean India Mission is a country-wide campaign initiated by the Government of India on 2 October 2014 to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management and to create Open Defecation Free villages. The program also aims to increase awareness of menstrual health management. It is a restructured version of the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan which was launched by the Government of India in 1999, as Total Sanitation Campaign.
A formal sanitation programme was first launched in India in 1954, followed by the Central Rural Sanitation Programme in 1986, the Total Sanitation Campaign in 1999 and the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in 2012. Phase 1 of the Swachh Bharat Mission lasted until 2 October 2019, and Phase 2 is being implemented between 2020–21 and 2024–25 to reinforce the achievements of Phase 1.
Initiated by the Government of India, the mission aimed to achieve an "open-defecation free" India by 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi through construction of toilets. According to government data, approximately 90 million toilets were constructed during this period. The objectives of the first phase of the mission also included eradication of manual scavenging, generating awareness and bringing about a behaviour change regarding sanitation practices, and augmentation of capacity at the local level.
The second phase of the mission aims to sustain the open defecation-free status and improve the management of solid and liquid waste, while also working to improve the lives of sanitation workers. The mission is aimed at progressing towards target 6.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals Number 6 established by the United Nations in 2015. By achieving the lowest open defecation-free status in 2019, India achieved its Sustainable Development Goal 6.2 health target in record time, eleven years ahead of the UN SDG target of 31 December 2030.
The campaign's official name is in Hindi. In English, it translates to "Clean India Mission". The campaign was officially launched on 2 October 2014 at Rajghat, New Delhi by the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi. It is India's largest cleanliness mission to date, with three million government employees, students and citizens from all parts of India participating in 4,043 cities, towns, and rural communities. At a rally in Champaran, the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, called the campaign Satyagrah se Swachhagrah in reference to Gandhi's Champaran Satyagraha launched on 10 April 1916.
The mission was split into two: rural and urban. In rural areas "SBM - Gramin" was financed and monitored through the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation whereas "SBM - urban" was overseen by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. The rural division has a five-tier mechanism: central, state, district, block panchayat, and gram panchayat.
The government provided a subsidy for the construction of nearly 90 million toilets between 2014 and 2019, although some Indians, especially in rural areas, choose not to use them. The campaign was criticised for using coercive approaches to force people to use toilets. Some people were stopped from defecating in open and threatened with withdrawal from government benefits.
The campaign was financed by the Government of India and state governments. The former released $5.8 billion of funds for toilet construction in 700,000 villages. The total budget for the rural and urban components was estimated at $28 billion, of which 93 per cent was for construction, with the rest being allocated for behaviour change campaigns and administration.
In 2022, approximately 157 million people in India, representing about 11% of the total population, were practising open defecation. This figure included 17% of the rural population and 0.5% of the urban population. In comparison, in 2000, around 776 million people, or 73% of the total population, practiced open defecation, including 91% of the rural population and 25.8% of the urban population, the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme reported. Although there has been significant progress, India still has the largest number of people practising open defecation, followed by Nigeria and Ethiopia.
According to the 2025 update by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, India's national open defecation rate declined to 7% in 2024. This progress was driven significantly by improvements in urban areas, where open defecation was reported as eliminated, a decline from 0.3% in 2023. Meanwhile, the rate in rural areas fell to approximately 11%.

Background

In 2011, the Census revealed that sanitation coverage, as measured by the number of households owning toilets was just 34 per cent in rural India. An estimated 600 million people defecate in the open, the highest of any country in the world. Coverage about open defecation and contamination of drinking and bathing water in India prompted the government to take measures to deal with the problem.

Previous sanitation campaigns

Since India's independence in 1947, there have been three rural sanitation intervention attempts before the Swachh Bharat Mission: the Central Rural Sanitation Programme, the Total Sanitation Campaign, and the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan. The first formal sanitation programme was first launched in 1954 as an extension of the First Five Year Plan of the Government of India. In 1982, National sanitation coverage was just 2%. This was followed by the launch of the Central Rural Sanitation Programme in 1986. These were directed towards the construction of toilets; no behavioural change campaign was carried out, and this supply-based approach did not result in broader social transformation. The CRSP aimed to improve the quality of life for rural people and emphasized helping rural women with privacy and dignity. Sanitation increased marginally by 9%. These were construction-led and achieved very little. The Total Sanitation Campaign was started in 1999. The TSC focused on increasing awareness around rural sanitation and informed rural populations about sanitation options specific to their living conditions. The Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was enacted in 2009 to generate demand for sanitation, linked to subsidy payments for the construction of toilets by families living below the poverty line. The program focused on community-led strategies and helped households, village schools, and community centres. TSC and Nirmal Bharat Yojana used the Panchayati Raj institutions for social mobilization. Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was launched in 2012.
A limited randomized study of eighty villages in rural Madhya Pradesh showed that the TSC programme did modestly increase the number of households with latrines, and had a small effect in reducing open defecation. Of the 138.2 million rural households in India, nearly 3.5 million constructed toilets. However, there was no improvement in the health of children." The earlier "Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan" rural sanitation program was hampered by the unrealistic approach. Lack of strong political will, lack of political leadership and lack of a behaviour change approach among the people also contributed to the failure of the projects. Consequently, Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was restructured by Cabinet approval on 24 September 2014 as Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
The rural household toilet coverage in India increased from 1% in 1981 to 11% in 1991, to 22% in 2001, to 32.7% in 2011. On 15 August 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the Red Fort in Delhi called on the public to pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi on his 150th birth anniversary by devoting to a clean India. Narendra Modi was the first Prime Minister to take up the Clean India Movement on a massive scale. Before the launch of Swachh India, 38.4% of rural households had toilets in 2013–14, 43.8% in 2014–15, 51.6% in 2015–16, 65.4% in 2016–17, 84.3% in 2017–18, 98.5% in 2018–19, and 98.5% in 2019–20. 100% toilet facilities are constructed.
Sources: Dashboard of SBM, Ministry of Jal Shakti; PRS.
The National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey of India reported that 96.5% of rural households in India had toilets. in a 2019–2020 report, the number was reduced to 1.4% or 19 million. Since 2014, the Government of India, has made remarkable strides in reaching the Open Defecation Free targets. 36 states and union territories, 706 districts and over 603,175 villages have been declared open defecation-free as of January 2020.
Where it achieved a measure of success, SBM built on the earlier sanitation programmes. It refined its approaches and templatised the action plan for districts. From the early 2010s, several district collectors and magistrates from West Bengal to Rajasthan experimented with different methods to engage local people and panchayats in community mobilisation. They selected swachhagrahis, trained them and released them for campaigns on a schedule. They were paid from sanitation funds. In states with strong panchayats, these measures bore fruit and the gains of sanitation, that is, toilet construction, were backed by usage. In other states, little was achieved beyond toilet construction.
Sl.No.State/UTNo. of IHHLs constructed
1Andaman & Nicobar Islands22,378
2Andhra Pradesh42,71,773
3Arunachal Pradesh1,44,608
4Assam40,05,740
5Bihar1,21,26,567
6Chhattisgarh33,78,655
7Dadra & Nagar Haveli and Daman & Diu21,906
8Goa28,637
9Gujarat41,89,006
10Haryana6,89,186
11Himachal Pradesh1,91,546
12Jammu & Kashmir12,61,757
13Jharkhand41,29,545
14Karnataka46,31,316
15Kerala2,39,360
16Ladakh17,241
17Madhya Pradesh71,93,976
18Maharashtra67,93,541
19Manipur2,68,348
20Meghalaya2,64,828
21Mizoram44,141
22Nagaland1,41,246
23Odisha70,79,564
24Puducherry29,628
25Punjab5,11,223
26Rajasthan81,20,658
27Sikkim11,209
28Tamil Nadu55,11,791
29Telangana31,01,859
30Tripura4,40,514
31Uttar Pradesh2,22,10,649
32Uttarakhand5,24,076
33West Bengal74,49,451
Total10,90,45,923

IHHL = Individual Household Latrine. Every toilet in every village is mapped in the Integrated Management Information System for real-time progress reporting. Every toilet is mandatorily geotagged to ensure transparency in the entire process.