Swachh Bharat Mission: Scaling up the Mission to Make Rural India Open Defecation Free (C)

This case is the first of a three-part series that follows the managerial, strategic, and communication decisions of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) or Clean India Mission, the flagship program of the Government of India to eliminate the practice of open defecation (i.e., not using a toilet) from 2014 to 2019. As of 2014, 550 million people in India practiced open defecation. This problem posed a massive public health hazard and economic drag for the country. Written from an insider’s perspective, the cases center on the decisions made by a new Secretary of India’s Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, who was hired to implement the SBM – focused on changing the behaviour of over 500 million people from open defecation to the usage of toilets. Case C discusses the team’s strategy to promote sanitation behaviour change, accelerate progress in states with particularly recalcitrant rates of open defecation, and monitor progress at a national scale. A key theme is how the team employed methods unconventional for a historically low-profile government ministry, including personalized attention to certain states, harnessing the power of stardom to communicate key messages, and continuing to leverage political commitment from the Central (Federal) government. The case ends with a sense of achievement but outlines the issues that could threaten the sustainability of the gains made in toilet. Readers are challenged to analyse how lessons from SBM could inform public policies for eliminating open defecation in other countries.