India’s National Sanitation Policies: Evolution, Impact and Recommendations

Abstract

India has launched five national sanitation policies since independence, and among these, the Swachh Bharath Mission-Grameen is the world’s largest sanitation campaign. Despite this achievement, the literature on understanding the evolution and impact of these policies is scarce. We are one of the earliest studies to address this literature gap. We find that as the campaign progressed, the programmes gained rigour in constructing toilets and in terms of behavioural change to induce people to use these toilets. However, despite the government’s claim of India being declared an open defecation–free (ODF) nation at the end of SBM, other government of India data sources claim otherwise. Hence, tracing the evolution and impact of national sanitation policies gives us valuable lessons to make India ODF in the future: (a) efforts to implement context-specific behaviour change campaigns can bring a sustained change in the social attitudes of people regarding sanitation, (b) optimising toilet infrastructure and aligning its pace of construction, (c) allocating budget for upkeep of already-built toilets under government programmes will reduce and even eliminate reversion to open defecation and (d) moving the sanitation outcomes from access to adoption will present an actual state of the sanitation environment in India. This article is one of the earliest in exploring rural sanitation in India from a policy history perspective, considering how sanitation practices and trends changed every time there was a change in the rural sanitation policy.