Sanitation Warriors: The Zila Swachh Bharat Prerak Programme
Chairman, Tata Trusts
FOR OVER 125 years, Tata Trusts has been at the frontiers of development in India through its approach to philanthropy which aims to bring about a lasting difference in the lives of our communities. Over this period, Tata Trusts has engaged with individuals and Government bodies, international agencies and like-minded organizations to build and nurture a self-sustaining ecosystem working across sectors from water and sanitation, healthcare, nutrition, education and livelihoods to arts, craft, and culture.
Before the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, announced the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) on Independence Day in 2014 from the ramparts of the Red Fort, India ranked among the countries with the worst under-nutrition, stunting and wasting levels in the world, even worse than some countries in sub-Saharan Africa. It had been estimated by various research groups that about 40 per cent of our children were stunted. India contributed to more than half of the world’s open defecation, the biggest impediment for the world to achieve clean water and sanitation for all people, which is among the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015 to be achieved by 2030. Poor levels of sanitation in rural areas have inhibited the effectiveness of nutrition initiatives like the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) and the mid-day meal scheme. Lack of sanitation in schools has resulted in a disproportional dropout rate among adolescent girls, many of whom are then married early, have very early pregnancies and children with low birth weight, who are highly susceptible to being malnourished. Stunted and wasted children do not achieve their full physical and cognitive potential, and this hampers their economic potential and their ability to provide better opportunities for their own children. This vicious cycle had to be eliminated.
Through the Tata Water Mission (TWM), the Tata Trusts is committed to provide access to safe drinking water and sanitation, which are both closely linked to nutrition. The Tata Trusts has been not only using the traditional strengths of community mobilization and capacity building, but also the power of innovative approaches and technological solutions. The landmark announcement of 2014 and the expression of political will in solving India’s sanitation crisis by none less than the Prime Minister inspired the Trusts to offer its full and unconditional support to the Mission.
The association began with supporting the office of the Secretary, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MDWS), with young managerial talent to infuse energy and fresh thinking on the policy front for the Mission. It eventually developed into one of the largest collaborative initiatives supported by the Tata Trusts – the Zila Swachh Bharat Prerak (ZSBP) programme – placing some of the brightest and most highly qualified youth with the district administrations to bring energy and fresh thinking into the implementation of the Mission as well.
The vision for the ZSBP programme too was inspired by the Prime Minister’s ‘Mann Ki Baat’ address on 25 September 2016, during which he appealed to the corporate world to come up with a model whereby young professionals can dedicatedly work at the grass-roots level to ensure the success of SBM-Grameen (SBM-G). In view of this, the Trusts along with the MDWS designed a fellowship programme with the aim to create a cadre of skilled young professionals, who would work with state governments and district administrations to oversee the implementation and monitoring of SBM-G. Through this initiative, Tata Trusts tried to channelize the energy of social capital towards the development of the country.
The young professionals were given the title of Zila Swachh Bharat Prerak and were trained by experts from the MDWS, and the Tata Centre for Development at the University of Chicago, along with the International Innovation Corps in areas of Project Management, Community Approaches to Sanitation and Data-Driven Decision Making. This equipped them to take on the on-ground challenges. The first batch of ZSBPs was deployed in April 2017. Over the next six months, more than 515 ZSBPs were deployed across the length and breadth of the country.
Jamsetji Tata said that a nation or a community advances when we lift up the best and the most gifted so as to make them the greatest service to the country. The ZSBP programme has been a realization of this vision. These young and highly skilled professionals were a diverse lot with backgrounds in management, engineering, law, social work, architecture, medicine. But each one went to the field with the same goal of ensuring that every Indian has access to safe sanitation facilities.
As the ZSBPs began their journey, they soon realized that every state and every district brought with it a unique set of challenges and opportunities. While some dealt with sub-zero temperatures in the hills of Kashmir where conventional toilets did not work as the water in the toilet pan froze and people used unsanitary dry-latrines, others worked in the remote districts of Arunachal Pradesh with scattered habitation and vast tracts of open land where transportation of bricks and cement was an expensive affair due to the absence of motorable roads. But the ZSBPs were unfazed by the challenges and took them in their stride. While some invoked Kashmiri culture and heritage to convince people to build and use sanitary toilets, others pushed the idea of pre-fabricated toilets that suited Arunachal Pradesh’s conditions. The ZSBPs had to work around socio-cultural norms, language barriers, lack of resources and, in some cases, even general apathy. But over the past two years, each such challenge has become a success story.
The programme gave a broad job-role to the ZSBPs and left it to the district and state administrations to utilize the assets on-hand. While some ZSBPs worked as Master Trainers, imparting Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) and Community Approaches to Sanitation (CAS) training to ground-level staffs and swachhagrahis, others worked with the administration in finding bottlenecks through data and trend analysis. For example, the ZSBP who joined the programme as the state coordinator in Bihar quickly realized that one of the major stumbling blocks in the state’s progress in SBM-G was the gaps in the baseline data. After taking the state and district administrations into confidence, the team under him in Bihar started a baseline validation exercise which led to the identification and removal of some duplicate and some non-existent baseline entries, resulting in instantaneous increase in Individual Household Latrine (IHHL) coverage in Bihar. This illustrates the major driving force ZSBPs have been in the success of SBM-G, and the MDWS has even acknowledged it in various forums.
When the ZSBP programme started in April 2017, the national sanitation coverage stood at 64.46 per cent. The rise in sanitation coverage from 38.7 per cent in 2014 to over 64 per cent was an appreciable increase, but with just over two years remaining to achieve 100 per cent coverage, a major fillip was required. The ZSBP programme was that fillip. As of June 2019, the national coverage stands at 99.05 per cent with over 5.62 lakh Open Defecation Free (ODF) villages. While the credit for this significant improvement goes to all the people associated with SBM-G, the ZSBPs have proven to be a great ally of the district and state administrations wherever they have worked. The ZSBPs have not only played a critical role in ensuring increase in IHHL coverage, but even more importantly, they have ensured substantial improvement in transparency factors like geo-tagging, verification of ODF villages and repair of dysfunctional toilets across the country.
Now, as SBM-G moves towards ODF-plus with focus on ODF Sustainability and Solid and Liquid Waste Management, the ZSBP programme has also stepped into Phase-2 with major focus on innovative ODF Sustainability measures and Waste Management solutions.
The ZSBP initiative was a first-of-its-kind partnership between a philanthropic organization and the Government of India to effect change at such a large scale. The success of Phase-1 of the initiative has certainly brought a remarkable transformation in the sanitation landscape of the country, and is due to all the young professionals who joined in this noble cause and contributed towards this nation-building exercise. For Tata Trusts, the success of the initiative is a testimony to our unwavering commitment to bringing about a lasting difference in the lives of our communities.