Three things to make Swachh Bharat a living reality

There are very few global comparisons one can make to the monumental goals of the new administration's Swachh Bharat. As it relates to WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) services for the poor, this is the largest such endeavour afoot globally. When one pauses to take in how hard this will be in a country as complex, expansive, diverse and dynamic as India, nothing before it even comes close.

While there is tremendous scepticism borne from intimate knowledge of what types of development schemes have been done in the past, many of us in the WASH sector wish to lean into the optimism of entirely overhauling what can be done in the future. Thus, Swachh Bharat has sparked a new wave of enthusiastic and rather heated debates in the sector.

From my own limited lens (my organisation focuses on WASH projects in cities targeting the poorest children), there are three key ingredients that, if missing, will ensure Swachh Bharat ends as most development projects do: with good intentions at the onset, weak execution in the centre, and a book's worth of broken promises at the end.

#1. Size matters: As is oft-stated, and sadly quite true, in the development sector: "pilots never fail, and pilots never scale". How many international aid projects have taken root in an isolated village or small neighbourhood across the country, never to see any further growth once the pilot is completed and its template handed over to the government for broader replication?

If national scale is the goal, then the programme needs to start big from the onset. Anything less than full district-level launches will keep the focus on the wrong goal lines, and far from completion near any of the deadlines currently being discussed.

Launching at scale is but the smallest part - an exercise in planning and coordination. Launching with integrity, however, requires an additional key ingredient: quality.

#2. Quality costs money: Quality materials are a must. I am not suggesting every poor household/school/hospital targeted by Swachh Bharat needs high tech and expensive products. But they do need, deserve, and want things that last. That standard alone should weed out underperforming products and overly complex technologies in general; and, more specifically, should dictate everything that happens before the budgets are set and the cacophonous tendering process begins.

If budgets outright supersede quality standardisation then every production house, implementer, and service provider will try and undercut every other competitor until the funding goes to those businesses that can provide the highest quantity over the best quality. Look to the Jalmani Programme for one clearcut and wholly related government water initiative that had great intent, but terrible execution once the bidding happened.

With all the talk of quality materials, it can't be lost that while long-lasting hardware can help create the conditions for long-term success, going to scale with durable products is only half the battle - the easiest half.

#3. People are the key: Of the few major international development projects that routinely function well over time, all seem to share one key ingredient toward their success: a heavy reliance on human resources, rather than on technology alone, to provoke and promote long-term change. And that is the key issue here: long-term change cannot be realised in the poorest communities solely from the addition of new water filters, toilets, handwashing stations, etc. That is simply shifts in hardware. Software is the key. And if this is to be a campaign that stretches across the nation, the software requirements are going to be colossal.

A crazy idea: What would it look like if Swachh Bharat focused on systematically training the poor to work in the same communities they are from, supporting them to develop elevated and possibly transferrable skill sets, and monitored their performance and managed to their outcomes to ensure this is not just a feel-good operation? The poor are the appropriate connective tissue between government and the communities they purport to serve, between the hardware additions and the behaviour change Swachh Bharat is meant to incite, and between the number of outputs designed in national budgets and depth of outcomes actually accomplished in communities.

The audacity of Swachh Bharat is inspirational. For that inspiration to turn into any real national satisfaction, though, there needs to be an entirely new way of approaching such transformative work.

To start, Swachh Bharat cannot go for anything less than full district coverage right from the start. To complete national coverage on time, this process has to start with purely audacious and fully ferocious launching sequences. It has to go big.

Second, the programme cannot support products that have short shelf lives, low value, weak supply chains, fragmented service, and poor oversight. Quality standards have to be integral from the onset, and established as a constant measure of success throughout, or Swachh Bharat will fail. Inferior products never last. And the poor don't want them. Indian graveyards of bad development projects, that occupy every district, state and region in the country, will attest to this.

Lastly, rely on your greatest asset: people, to make this become a gold standard for development. There is no shortage of talent at management level, and no shortage of idle workers capable of filling the hundreds of thousands of community worker slots needed to ensure this programme does what it claims it will, and to adequately maintain the work once the initial programme is completed.