Swachh Bharat Mission 

(SBM), Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or Clean India

This Mission is a country-wide campaign initiated by the Government of India in 2014 to

eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management. It is a restructured version of
the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan launched in 2009 that failed to achieve its intended targets.
Phase 1 of the Swachh Bharat Mission lasted till October 2019.
Phase 2 is being implemented between 2020–21 and 2024–25 to help cement the work of Phase
1.
Initiated by the Government of India, the mission aimed to achieve an "open-defecation free"
(ODF) India by 2 October 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi through
construction of toilets. An estimated 89.9 million toilets were built in the period. The objectives
of the first phase of the mission also included eradication of manual scavenging, generating
awareness and bringing about a behavior 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.
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 Prime
Minister Narendra Modi. It is India's largest cleanliness drive to date with three million
government employees and students from all parts of India participating in 4,043 cities, towns,
and rural communities.
At a rally in Champaran, the Prime minister called the campaign Satyagrah se Swatchhagrah 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 (since converted
to the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation under the Ministry of Jal Shakti; whereas
"SBM - urban" was overseen by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. As part of the
campaign, volunteers, known as Swatchhagrahis, or "Ambassadors of cleanliness", promoted the
construction of toilets using a popular method called Community-Led Total Sanitation at the
village level. Other activities included national real-time monitoring and updates from non-
governmental organizations such as The Ugly Indian, Waste Warriors, and SWACH Pune (Solid
Waste Collection and Handling).
The government provided subsidy for construction of nearly 90 million toilets between 2014 and
2019, although some Indians especially in rural areas choose to not use them. The campaign was
criticized 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 (Rs 40,700 crore) funds for toilet construction 700,000 villages. The total budget for
the rural and urban components was estimated at $28 billion, 93 per cent for construction and the
rest for behaviour change campaigns and administration.
In 2011, the Census revealed that sanitation coverage as measured by the number of households
owing toilets was just 34 per cent in rural India. An estimated 600 million people defecated 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 government to take measures to
deal with the problem.
Previous Sanitation Campaigns
The first formal sanitation programme was first launched in 1954, followed by Central Rural
Sanitation Programme in 1986. These were construction-led and achieved very little. The Total
Sanitation Campaign (TSC) was started in 1999 and Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan in 2012 to generate
demand for sanitation, linked to subsidy payments for the construction of toilets by families
living below the poverty line.
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 (a 2001 figure), nearly
3.5 million constructed toilets.[31] However, there was no improvement in the health of
children." The earlier "Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan" rural sanitation program was hampered by the
unrealistic approach. 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. 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 Jan 2020. But a government
survey in late 2018 pointed out that nearly 30% of households did not have a toilet and 32%
defecated in the open. India has constructed an impressive number of toilets under SBM in just
five years. It has made people aware about toilets. But despite this tremendous achievement,
usage of toilets remains low.
Where it achieved a measure of success, SBM built on the earlier sanitation programmes. It
refined their approaches and templates 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.
Components
The core objectives of the first phase of the mission were to reduce open defecation and improve
management of municipal solid waste in both urban and rural areas. Elimination of open
defecation was to be achieved through construction of individual household level toilets (often
twin pit pour flush pit latrines), toilets and public toilets. For improving solid waste management,
cities were encouraged to prepare detailed project reports that are bankable and have a financial
model. The second phase on the other hand focuses on sustaining gains of the first phase and
improving management of the solid and liquid wastes.
Finance
SBM was budgeted at $28 billion. The government provides an incentive of Rs12,000 (US$160)
for each toilet constructed by a rural family. An amount of Rs 90 billion (US$1.2 billion) was
allocated for the mission in the 2016 Union budget of India. The World Bank provided a US$1.5
billion loan and $25 million in technical assistance in 2015 for the Swachh Bharat Mission to
support India's universal sanitation initiation. This was to be released in installments subject to
checks by an independent verification agency but till January 2017, no fund has been disbursed.
The programme has also received funds and technical support from several international
organizations and private companies as part of corporate social responsibility initiatives, and
the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan schemes. Indian Naval
Academy cadets taking part in Swachh Bharat Mission, 2016
The Government appointed CPWD with the responsibility to dispose of waste from Government
offices. The Ministry of Railways planned to have the facility of cleaning on demand, clean bed-
rolls from automatic laundries, bio-toilets, dustbins in all non-AC coaches. The Swachh Bharat
Swachh Vidyalaya campaign was launched by the Minister of Human Resource Development,
Government of India by participating in the cleanliness drive along with the school's teachers and
students. Individual household latrines coverage in rural India.
Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) Mobile app is being used by people and Government
organisations for achieving the goals of Swachh Bharat Mission. For this the government of
India is bringing awareness to the people through advertisements. In 2017, the national sanitation
coverage rose to 65% from 38.7% on Oct 2, 2014 before the start of the campaign. It was 90% in
August 2018. 35 states/Union Territories, 699 districts and 5.99 lakh (599,000) villages were
declared Open Defecation Free (ODF) by 25 September 2019.
The cities and towns which have been declared ODF stood at 22 percent and the urban wards
which have achieved 100 percent door-to-door solid waste collection stood at 50 percent. The
number of Swachhagrahi volunteers working across urban local bodies rose to 20,000, and those
working in rural India rose to more than a 100,000. The number of schools with separate toilet
facilities for girls rose from 0.4 million (37 percent) to almost one million (91 percent).
Swachh Survekshan annual cleanliness survey
Swachh Survekshan, commissioned by Ministry of Urban Development and carried out
by Quality Council of India, is an extensive sanitation survey across several hundred cities to
check the progress and impact of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and to foster a spirit of competition
among the cities. The performance of each city is evaluated on six parameters:
 Municipal solid waste, sweeping, collection and transportation
 Municipal solid waste, processing, and disposal of solid waste
 Open defecation free and toilets
 Capacity building and eLearning
 Provision of public toilets and community toilets
 Information, education and communication, and behavior change
Sunita Devi who was inspired by the campaign won the Nari Shakti Puraskar award in 2019 for
constructing toilets in Jharkhand.
According to the dashboards maintained by respective ministries, more than 100 million
individual household level toilets have been constructed in rural areas, and 6 million household
toilets in urban areas. In addition, nearly 6 million community and public toilets have also been
constructed in the urban areas. Consequently, 4,234 cities and more than 600,000 villages across
the country have declared themselves open defecation frees (ODF).
More than 81.5 thousand wards in urban areas now have 100% door to door collection of solid
waste and nearly 65 thousand wards practice 100% segregation of waste at source. Of the nearly
150 thousand metric tonnes of solid waste generated in urban areas, 65% is being processed.
An independent survey released by Quality Council of India in August 2017, reported that
overall national rural "household access to toilet" coverage increased to 62.5% and usage of
toilets to 91.3%, with Haryana topping the national ranking with 99% of households in rural
areas covered and usage of toilets of 100%. According to UNICEF the number of people without
a toilet reduced from 550 million to 50 million. The World Bank reports that 96% of Indians who
have a toilet use it. There have also been reports of people not using the toilets despite having
one, although according to the World Bank 96% of Indians used the toilets they had. World
Health Organization (WHO) has in its report stated that at least 180,000 diarrhoeal deaths were
averted in rural India since the launch of the Swachh Bharat Mission. According to a survey
carried out in 2018 and published in 2019 by National Statistical Office (NSO), 71% of rural
households had access to toilets as of 2018. Though this was at odds with the Indian
government's claim in 2019 that 95% of rural households had access to toilets, NSO's numbers
still indicated a significant improvement over the situation during the previous survey period in
2012, when only 40% of rural households had access to toilets.
A study by Ashoka University concluded that the construction of toilets under the program led to
a reduction in incidence of sexual assault against women. Data from the National Family Health
Surveys (NFHS) demonstrate the increase in access to improved sanitation due to SBM. Post
2015, 3.4% households gained access to better sanitation as compared to just 1.5% earlier
The mission is noted as the world's largest sanitation program. It claimed to have provided
millions of people access to toilet and brought about a change of behavior towards its
usage. Many argue that it has not really eliminated open defecation as rapidly as the government
claims. However, it significantly did accelerate the pace of decline in open defecation.
Political Sponsorship
The SBM received political sponsorship from Prime Minister Modi who started talking about
sanitation even before he was elected as the Prime Minister. He made a call to address the issue
in his first address to the nation on the occasion of Independence Day in 2014. Throughout the
mission period, he continued to promote the mission through his speeches and was seen wielding
the broom multiple times to clean the streets. In 2019, he plugged on a beach
in Mamallapuram during his morning walk; he was there to attend the informal summit with Xi
Jinping, then-General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Other political leaders and
public figures including actors and actresses, sports men and women, owners of large business
houses were roped in as ambassadors to promote the mission.
Allocation of funds
Constructing toilets became the mission's singular focus, even though the core objectives were
elimination of open defecation and improving solid waste management. Funds for solid waste
management under the mission were diverted towards toilet construction. Allocations for other
sectors were also drastically reduced. Though behavioral change is one of the goals of the
mission, only 1% of the mission's outlay was spent on education and awareness. Most of the
allocation for the category, “information, education and communication”, that was to be used for
awareness generation was spent towards print, radio and television advertisements. No part of
the Central Government's allocation was spent on awareness generation at the grass roots.
Target driven approach
The mission was implemented with a target driven approach; villages, districts, towns and cities
and even states declared themselves open defecation free (ODF) based on achievement of
construction targets. The SBM has also been criticized for being subsidy-driven rather than
community-driven.
Inappropriate Containment System
For lack of sewerage systems, most of the toilets constructed under the mission rely on single
pit or twin pits or septic systems for containment of faecal sludge. However, their
appropriateness for the local context was not considered in the haste of achieving construction
targets. For example, most of the 7.85 million toilets constructed at an estimated cost of INR
94,205 million in the 15 extreme flood-prone districts of Northern Bihar become unusable during
the annual floods. Besides the toilet itself being inaccessible, the containment structure is also
inundated with flood waters making it unusable.
The SBM does not even acknowledge the issues of the existing sewerage systems and the deaths
of numerous sanitation workers caused in cleaning them.
Survey Results
Even though elimination of open defecation was the core objective of the mission, it was never
monitored by either of the Ministries. They both kept a track of toilets constructed and funds
spent. Therefore, the reality reported by independent surveys was very different from that
reported by Government sponsored surveys. Researchers found divergence between findings of
the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) and National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey
(NARSS); both conducted by the Government only a few months apart.
Interconnected Challenges
By adding millions of on-site sanitation systems and not considering fecal sludge management, it
will further add to pollution of the rivers in India.
There is skepticism about the success of SBM which relates to sanitation workers. The people
who make India clean, the sanitation workers, remain "invisible in the participation, process or
consequences of this national level movement".  In 2015, one year after the launch of the
program, hundreds of thousands of Indian people were still employed as manual scavengers in
emptying bucket toilets and pit latrines. Many continue to work on contractual arrangements
without safety of their job and benefits that would accrue from a government job. The SBM has
instead burdened the contractual sanitation workers to keep public places clean while keeping it
voluntary for the public to deface public places by urinating, defecating or littering them.
A report by WSSCC in 2019 found that the impact of the SBM for the most vulnerable was
limited. The report stated that "Barriers due to physical disabilities, social/economic disparities,
geography, sexual orientation, gender and caste were not addressed."
Irregularities with regards to the funds have been reported. In Odisha hundreds of beneficiaries
have filed complaints that money has been siphoned off without constructing the
toilets. In Madhya Pradesh almost half a million Swachh Bharta toilets have "vanished" in a
multi billion rupees scam. In Bihar crores of rupees meant for Swachh Bharat Mission were
siphoned off by Government officials in collusion with banks Police complaints were filed
against those who have misused Swachh Bharat funds for personal household expenses.
Start Up India
 The Startup India scheme was first announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015.
 A company is defined to be a startup if it is headquartered in India, which was opened less
than 10 years ago, and has an annual turnover of fewer than Rs100 crores.
 The startup India scheme is implemented by Department for Promotion of Industry and
Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce and Industry
 The government has already launched the I-MADE programme to assist Indian
entrepreneurs in creating 10 lakh (1 million) mobile app start-ups, as well as the MUDRA
Bank's scheme (Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana).
 This program is to provide micro-finance, low-interest rate loans to entrepreneurs from low
socioeconomic backgrounds.
 This scheme has been allocated an initial capital of 20,000 crores (US$3.1 billion in 2020).
 "India will celebrate January 16 as National Start-up Day," the Indian Prime Minister
recently announced.
 Eligibility for Start Up India Scheme:
o If it is registered in India as a private limited company, a partnership firm, or a limited liability
partnership,
o For a period of up to 10 years after its incorporation/registration.
o If its annual turnover has not surpassed INR 100 crores in any of the financial years after
incorporation/registration.
o If it is trying to improve products, processes, or services through innovation, development, or
improvement, or if it is a scalable company model with a strong potential for job creation or
wealth creation.
 The Start Up India Action Plan focuses on three core areas such as
o Simplification and Handholding.
 Compliance Regime based on Self-Certification
 Startup India Hub
 Rolling-out of Mobile App and Portal
 Legal Support and Fast-tracking Patent Examination at Lower Costs
 Relaxed Norms of Public Procurement for Startups
 Faster Exit for Startups
o Funding Support and Incentives.
 Providing Funding Support through a Fund of Funds with a Corpus of INR 10,000 crore
 Credit Guarantee Fund for Startups
 Tax Exemption on Capital Gains
 Tax Exemption to Startups for 3 years
 Tax Exemption on Investments above Fair Market Value
o Industry-Academia Partnership and Incubation.
 Organizing Startup Fests for Showcasing Innovation and Providing a Collaboration Platform
 Launch of Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) with Self-Employment and Talent Utilization
(SETU) Program
 Harnessing Private Sector Expertise for Incubator Setup
 Building Innovation Centres at National Institutes
 Setting up of 7 New Research Parks Modeled on the Research Park Setup at IIT Madras
 Promoting Startups in the Biotechnology Sector
 Launching of Innovation Focused Programs for Students
 Annual Incubator Grand Challenge
Need For Start-Up India
Need for Start-Up India
 With almost 72% of the founders being less than 35 years of age, India is third among
global start-up ecosystems with more than 4,200 new-age companies.
 Various limitations still exist such as getting credit, electricity, paying taxes and resolving
insolvency etc.
 Certain tight spots exist such as it is difficult to get loans in India, especially for start-ups
and medium and small scale enterprises.
 Start-ups and entrepreneurship can increase private investment in the economy.
 Start-ups hold the potential of creating more jobs at a time when the manufacturing sector is
trending to slow growth prospects.
Benefits of Startup India
Benefits of Startup India
 To lower the cost of registering a patent.
 The Bankruptcy Code has been updated to ensure a 90-day exit window.
 For the first three years of business, there will be no mystifying inspections or capital gains
tax.
 As part of the Atal Innovation Mission, an innovation hub will be established.
 5 lakh schools would be targeted, with 10 lakh youngsters participating in innovation-related
programmes.
 To create new schemes that will protect startup companies' intellectual property rights.
 To promote entrepreneurship all around the country.
 To promote India as a global start-up hotspot.
Challenges Associated
Challenges Associated with Start-Up India
Increased Investments Do Not Ensure Startup Success
 Money is no longer a difficult task to raise in the immediate wake of the Covid-19 crisis when
central banks have released a global glut of liquidity.
 The billions of dollars invested in startups represent large bets on long-term outcomes, rather
than revenue generation.
 Furthermore, with such investments, it is impossible to predict the high rate of survival of
these startups, which can be guaranteed by profits.
India's Space Startups Are Still a Marginal Player
 While India's fintech and e-commerce startups are doing exceptionally well, the space startup
sector remains an outlier.
 The global space economy is currently valued at $440 billion, with India accounting for less
than 2% of the market.
 Despite the fact that India is a leading space faring country with end-to-end capabilities in
satellite manufacturing, augmented launch vehicle development, and interplanetary mission
deployment, this is the case.
 The lack of a framework to provide transparency and clarity in laws is one of the reasons for
the lack of independent private participation in space.
Indian Investors Unwilling to Take Risks
 Soft Bank of Japan, Ali-baba of China, and Sequoia Capital of the United States are among
the major investors in India's startup sector.
 This is because India lacks a serious venture capital industry with a risk appetite.
 Established conglomerates in the country have mostly stuck to traditional businesses.
Way Forward
Way Forward
 India's rich diversity has always been important in defining the country's global identity.
 Unicorns and startups in India are messengers of this diversity, which can help India, compete
with other countries around the world.
 In terms of the future of Indian startups, only half of the Indian population is currently online,
and the digital domain's future possibilities are vast.
 In order to ensure the country's holistic development, an appeal to startups to move to India's
villages is required.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Indian Startups are now spread in various small towns and cities across the country. Therefore it
is imperative that there is the development of necessary infrastructure and support to help build
the startup ecosystem. A well-built framework to provide transparency and clarity in-laws with
respect to the startup ecosystem in the space sector is required.