1.Gandhi as role model

• SBM, as a nation-wide cleanliness drive, was launched on 2nd October, 2014, the birthday of India’s most revered ‘role model’ Mahatma Gandhi.
• The day was chosen to leverage the values propagated by him and thereby create a mass movement on the lines of ‘satyagraha’ for a cleaner India.
• The symbol used for SBM invokes Gandhiji’s ideas.

• To initiate behavioural change in usage of toilets, more than five lakh swachhagrahis, foot soldiers of the SBM, were recruited; the similarity with satyagrahis is intentional to reinforce the message.
• As each village has at least one swachhagrahi, who is a local, they were able to leverage their social ties within their villages to effect change.
• People are more likely to listen to and emulate someone they know, which is why local ambassadors of change are more effective in getting through to people than mass media campaigns.

• Further, SBM relies on community-based approaches to sanitation. Behaviour change techniques such as
• Participatory Rural Appraisal and Community-led Total Sanitation
• It induces people to come together, appraise their community’s open defecation situation and plan the next course of action.
• This makes sanitation a community-level concern.
• Non-conformers, therefore, find their act more visible to their community.
• The fear of community scorn, or a desire to fit in, or both, have led many to renounce open defecation.

• SBM used yet another behavioural insight – that people internalize messages better when these
• messages make them feel a certain way.
• Appealing to people’s emotions by attaching a sense of disgust to open defecation, has a better chance of moving people to change.
• Many swachhagrahis delivered the message that open defecation is tantamount to eating one’s
• own excreta, as flies sit on excreta left in open spaces and then sit on food.
• The campaigns that elicit emotional reactions are more effective than those that deliver plain, recondite messages.

• SBM is not the first programme to address sanitation concerns.
• However, there were no dramatic shifts in the access rates until SBM as shown in the Figure below.
• SBM is the first one to emphasize behaviour change as much as construction of toilets.
• Within five years of the launch of SBM, household access to toilets has increased to nearly 100 per cent in all states.

• SBM has achieved success in not only providing toilets but also in ensuring that these toilets are used.
• National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) 2018-19 has found that
  • 93.1 per cent of rural households had access to toilets
  • 96.5 per cent of the households in rural India who have access to a toilet use it.
• This reconfirmed the Open Defecation Free (ODF) status of 90.7 per cent of villages

• Female literacy and early marriages of girls correlate powerfully with access and usage of toilets across states.
• Toilet access and usage can be suitably increased with behavioural nudges that push female literacy rates up and discourage early marriages of girls.
• In this respect, the BBBP scheme complements SBM strongly.
• Factors related to gender empowerment are seen to be significantly correlated with toilet access and usage.
• This interplay can be effectively used to improve the efficacy of both the schemes.