A Disruption Called Swachh Bharat
Professor, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
THE CONVERSATION ABOUT ‘shit’ has been an uncomfortable one for many for decades, if not centuries. Any talk of faeces, or even toilets, has never been considered ‘civilized’ conversation. However, in 2015, when the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were defined, open defecation and its health impacts were identified as one of the biggest challenges facing human health. ‘Sanitation for all’ is SDG 6.2 and the lion’s share of the achievement of this goal relied on India, where nearly 60 per cent of the world’s open defecators resided.
On 15 August 2014, as the people of India listened to their newly elected Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, deliver his maiden Independence Day address from the Red Fort, something remarkable happened. For the first time ever a Prime Minister of India addressed the nation on the subject of toilets. Why, he asked, was the shameful practice of open defecation rampant in the India of the twenty-first century? In his speech, he set the audacious goal of fulfilling Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of a clean India by 2 October 2019, Gandhi’s 150th birthday. It was a moment of disruption.
Behavioural science tells us that disruption requires three things: Surprise, Revaluation and Performance. Surprise because you have to get people’s attention and tell them something new. Revaluation because you have to make people want change; show them a new world where things can be better. Performance because you have to make new behaviours possible in the settings in which they take place. This is as true of the behaviours of the masses as of the elite whose job it is to lead change.
Changing entrenched behaviour, like open defecation which has continued for centuries, isn’t easy, however. In the Swachh Bharat Mission, I witnessed behaviour change which started at the top – the policymakers! The Prime Minister surprised everyone by placing the unexpected subject of open defecation right on top of his agenda in 2014. His team set out a vision of a clean India that made people revalue and desire toilets. The performance of the Government team was disrupted by doing many things differently from business-as-usual. So how did this happen?
Disrupting Behaviour Settings
Governments the world over have fixed patterns of behaviour and those habits are completely predictable. This is because an office is what is known as a ‘behaviour setting’, where established roles, routines, rules and objects dictate daily activity. The everyday routines of office work, for example, are pretty much the same – the 9 a.m. start, tea break, lunch break, and finally the 5 p.m. close of business. All officials know their role, their job, and how it fits in the hierarchy of other roles in the organization. The objects they use are the same everywhere. Piles of files lie on real or virtual desktops, waiting to be processed using real or virtual writing instruments. As a result, no one has to think much about what they are doing; behaviour runs on auto-pilot. Any deviation from the established pattern is met with disapproval, or some other form of sanction.
Political disruption succeeds only when it is translated into disruptive action by the administrators on the ground. Staff at the Swachh Bharat Mission-Grameen (SBM-G) sat down and started figuring out what they would have to do to meet this challenge. Working with states to change the age-old habits of 550 million people by building them 100 million toilets in only 1,825 days seemed an impossible task. One thing they knew: business-as-usual was not going to do the trick. They would have to start with disrupting long-standing habits in their own backyards.
Roles Were Disrupted by Bringing In Young Blood
The Swachh Bharat team at the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation realized that if it was to achieve the seemingly impossible goal of an Open Defecation Free (ODF) India it had to become a disruptor; it had to change something in the behaviour settings of fellow Government officials throughout India.
So the team members set to work. First they redefined their own roles . Instead of functioning as simply Government workers, they started working in mission-mode, with one objective: to make India ODF by 2019. New roles were created by bringing in young blood to take on new functions, such as agile planning, communications, social media and rapid feedback on progress to districts. No longer did normal office routines apply. The SBM-G staff found themselves in the building at dawn, often leaving late at night. Lunch breaks became informal seminars on the topic of toilets. The office itself was discarded as a work setting with a large number of days spent on the road and in remote rural districts, to spur the people on. Rules were broken. For example, the Secretary shocked observers when he volunteered to empty toilet pits himself, showing how the twin-pit design worked to neutralize toilet waste.
On the ground, an army of swachhagrahis was recruited and trained to trigger behaviour change concerning toilets in thousands of villages. Instead of following the rule book, districts were encouraged to make up rules for themselves, spurring grassroots innovation, mass-mobilization events, and sharing inspiring individual stories of people who had made their villages ODF.
Did Disrupting Government Settings Work?
SINCE OCTOBER 2014, it is reported that over 97 million new households toilets have been constructed (as of June 2019), and millions of older toilets which had become dysfunctional have been retrofitted. Over 85 per cent of the new toilets have already been geo-tagged, and their pictures are available in the public domain. These efforts have taken the national rural sanitation coverage to over 93 per cent according to the National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey 2018–19 (under the World Bank support project to SBM-G).
As a result, more than 550 million people have changed their behaviour and stopped defecating in the open. The World Health Organization estimates that the Mission will have saved over 300,000 lives in the five years since its inception, if India can reach its stated goal of 100 per cent toilet coverage by October 2019.
It is only fitting that Swachh Bharat is celebrating its extraordinary success in this 150th birth year of Gandhi. The celebrations were kick-started with the Mahatma Gandhi International Sanitation Convention in New Delhi in the run-up to 2 October 2018 with Prime Minister Modi, the UN Secretary General and Ministers for sanitation from over fifty countries. The participants who attended learnt how disruption of business-as-usual has been key to the success of the Swachh Bharat story and that this has mobilized millions to care about, and act upon, this most unlikely of causes.
The Lesson in the Success of Swachh Bharat
The Swaach Bharat Mission shows that behaviour can be modified, both at the level of policy and in society. Now, from not being comfortable even talking about toilets, the discourse has changed to the extent that ornaments that look like ‘shit’ are now sold at gift shops! India would not have been able to transform its sanitation behaviour without surprising everyone by beginning a dialogue about toilets, making them culturally valued, and without making performance possible by disrupting the settings of everyday behaviour in Government offices and amongst millions in India.
Much of our daily behaviour is routine, standard, unchanging and unthinking, deeply embedded in the settings of everyday life. These fixed patterns can be hard to change. But if we want to make a difference, whether in our personal or in our professional lives, we need to find disruption points. We need to change the objects, routines, roles or rules that keep us on autopilot and tell us what to do. Only then can we achieve audacious, transformative goals for ourselves, and our nations.