The reality of the Swachh Bharat Mission
Relevance: GS Paper III
Why in News?
India was ranked at the bottom of 180 countries in the Environment Performance Index (EPI) in 2022 despite the government's efforts to improve the situation through campaigns like the Swachh Bharat Mission, Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, and the National Clean Air Programme.
Environment Performance Index (EPI):
- The EPI ranks countries on climate change performance, environmental health, and ecosystem vitality.
- It measures 40 performance indicators across 11 issue categories: air quality, drinking water and sanitation.
- The government responded to India’s bottom rank by saying the methodology is faulty and does not objectively quantify the Indian scenario.
Government interventions:
- The government has embarked on development campaigns, including the Swachh Bharat Mission, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, and the National Clean Air Programme.
- These missions aim to enable better living standards. The SBM is meant to address the issue of WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Health).
- However, what is seen is an increase in the vulnerability of the population owing to air and water pollution, among others.
Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) critique:
Gap between objectives and reality -
- The SBM and SBM 2.0 aim to make all cities garbage-free. This project has been politically successful; no Opposition party or community has raised objections to it. State agencies govern and monitor the entire project.
- The government claims that India is open defecation-free, but the reality is different.
- A 2020 Comptroller and Auditor General report raised many questions about the government’s claims about the SBM's success on this front.
- It indicated the poor quality of the construction of toilets under this scheme.
- A few urbanisation studies pointed out that in some metros, communities in slums still do not have access to public toilets.
- In rural India, toilet construction has not been linked to waste treatment.
- In peri-urban areas, the faecal sludge generated is tossed into the environment and water systems.
Reinforcing existing power dynamics and inequalities -
- Sanitation and waste management in India are associated with the wide prevalence of caste. Historically, the subjugated castes have been forced to carry out sanitation work. The SBM tried to create a narrative that sanitation is everyone’s job.
- One thing the government intended to do via SBM was to reduce people's involvement in waste management by replacing them with large, capital-intensive technologies.
- However, these installations have not met their promises, leading to health crises emerging from the irresponsible management of waste.
- In this scenario, the governments outsourced most of the work to private players, who employed the same subjugated communities to handle waste.
- City governments are being asked to buy more machines, including road sweeping machines that cost no less than ₹1 crore, more vehicles to transport the waste from one corner to another with geo-tagging, and so on.
- Funds are made available to the city governments for such plans. However, all this work is being handed over to large contractors entering the city domains to make sanitation a profitable entity. Most of the workers employed by these contractors belong to marginalised communities.
- Hence, a scheme fully owned by the state has become a toolkit for the privatisation of public health services and continues caste discrimination.
- The Union government employs technological solutions to handle solid waste in most towns. Some of these solutions are waste-to-energy plants and biological methanation.
- But there are barely any success stories in either case.
Gap in sanitation inspection infrastructure:
- On March 30, 2024, in the Himachal Pradesh High Court, the Urban Development Department said that there are just five sanitation inspectors in the Shimla Municipal Corporation, which comprises 34 wards.
- Instead of recruiting more such inspectors, this cadre was declared dead after retiring. In a State with more than 50 municipal bodies, there are only 20 sanitation inspectors, which means that some municipalities do not have sanitation inspectors.
Interconnectedness of EPI and development campaigns:
- The EPI may be quite comprehensive. However, one of its features is mapping, which exposes the unsustainability of our development processes.
- This means that development models must be altered.
- The EPI must also be considered in the context of a recent Supreme Court judgement observing the links between climate change and basic human rights.
- Climate scientists have said that the reasons for the current problems are anthropogenic and systemic in nature.
Conclusion:
Addressing India's environmental challenges requires a comprehensive and integrated approach prioritising sustainability, equity, and social justice. This involves reevaluating development strategies, enhancing enforcement mechanisms, and promoting community participation and accountability in environmental governance. Problems with implementing the programmes have been dragging down India’s EPI performance. There is a need to link policies to human rights in order to tackle these issues.
