SWACHH BHARAT MISSION

Throughout the world around 2.5 billion people do not have toilets to use, out of those 250 crore people 65 crore live in India alone. In order to solve this big challenge government of India has launched “Swachh Bharat Mission” on the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. Due to magnanimity of the problem solving it will not be easy. Government has to face the problems associated with extremely poor hygienic conditions and most significantly government has to fight with attitude towards cleanliness. Poor sanitation is linked to various social as well as economic factors like extreme poverty, educational level, religious affiliation and society which does not challenge the unclean behavior but there are some infrastructural challenges as well like lack of toilets, availability of pit and flush. Effort of “Swachh Bharat Mission” is two dimensional, one from the government agencies and other from the non-governmental organizations. Government intention is to increase the peer pressure and make India “open defecation free” by 2019. Sanitation problem has serious implications on the health. Poor sanitation results to high rate of morbidity and mortality with in India. Poor sanitation is also responsible for lot of diseases like cholera, typhoid, pneumonia, worm infection etc. Sanitation in India can be divided in to two groups of urban sanitation and rural sanitation. At the level of urban area three major schemes are run by the central government for the improvement of sanitation.

• Under JNNURM Basic services to urban poor (BSUP) and Rajiv Awas yojana(RAY).
• National urban sanitation policy,2008.
• Integrated low cost sanitation programme.

BSUP work for the development of basic services for the urban poor which includes water and sanitation, while RAY work to make urban areas slum free. National urban sanitation policy attempts to make urban areas a healthy place to live and provide universal sanitation coverage for the urban areas. While the main problem in urban areas for sanitation is increasing population which existing infrastructure is not able to sustain but in rural areas problem is mainly associated with access to water and sanitation services. At present 33 percent households have toilets in rural areas which are major improvement from 9 percent in 1991. Major programs through which this improvement has been achieved are-

• Central Rural Sanitation Programme(CRSP) launched in 1986
• CRSP was restructured to create Total sanitation campaign in 1999, which was a community led programme.
• Finally Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was launched in 2012 in order to make India nirmal by 2022.

Though lots of programs were present in both urban and rural areas but need for a better programme was felt because results from previous programs were not satisfactory. In order to make India cleaner place to live Swachh Bharat Mission was launched important features of this program are-

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