11 Years Later, Swachh Bharat Progress Mired In Weak Verification

Eleven years after India launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, the Union government’s flagship rural sanitation programme, it has missed its target of ‘Sampoorn Swachhata’ by 2024-25, exposing gaps in waste management, untreated sewage, and behavioural change that challenge the sustainability of India’s sanitation progress. The first phase of the programme focused on making India open-defecation-free (ODF) by 2019, including construction of 100 million household toilets. Over 119 million individual household latrines and 260,000 community sanitary complexes were built, leading the government to declare India open defecation-free by October 2019 . But usage remained poor, as IndiaSpend had reported in 2019. With over Rs 66,000 crore invested, this phase relied on a standa