Power of Faith for a Swachh and Swasth Bharat
Secretary General, Global Interfaith WASH Alliance
IT IS SAID, ‘Faith can move mountains.’ With approximately 84 per cent of people in the world and over 90 per cent of the people in India subscribing to faith, it is perhaps the most powerful force we have.
Faith is that which guides and informs our beliefs and therefore our actions. When we united with the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), we knew that faith would bring great and lasting change. So it was that the Global Interfaith WASH Alliance (GIWA) took action alongside the Government of India for this crucial cause. Faith has become a robust force in the Swachh Bharat movement.
The Historic Call
In 2014, the Honourable Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modiji, gave a historic clarion call for a Swachh Bharat. He called upon the people of India to be active co-creators in the condition of their country, to abandon obsolete ideas of cleanliness being someone else’s business, and to take up the job of making India swachh, sundar, surakshit and swasth. Shri Modiji put the power back into the hands of the people. With each of us joining hands, hearts, minds and missions, we can make our country clean, healthy and prosperous.
Along with the call for cleanliness, Shri Modiji demonstrated the power of personal action. When he raised not only his voice but also his own hands to sweep the streets it filled the country with ardent enthusiasm: If the Prime Minister can sweep, everyone can sweep! If it’s not beneath Modiji, it isn’t beneath anyone. This shift from ‘anshan’ (demonstration) to action was further underscored when the Prime Minister personally helped construct a toilet in Varanasi in 2017.
HH Pujya Swami Chidanand Saraswatiji, the founder of GIWA, has emphasized to the masses, ‘When the head of a nation becomes the Pradhan Sevak, serves as a Safai Sevak and has the courage to be a Chowkidar then the entire nation will naturally rise to the call.’
However, in a country of more than 1 billion people, the endeavour to teach, touch and transform the lives of the people of 6,00,000 villages, speaking twenty-two languages and innumerable dialects, was Herculean.
That is where GIWA came in. After decades of unifying and inspiring leaders and communities of all faiths, we realized that faith can also bridge the gap between infrastructure and inner structure, between that which has been provided by the Government and the values and belief systems which determine the people’s response. Faith leaders provide us with a moral and social compass, and their words carry unparalleled motivational power.
Uniting the Forces of Faith
The premise upon which GIWA was founded is that our definition of peace must expand. GIWA is committed to a definition of peace that includes refraining from any behaviour that might cause the suffering and/or death of our sisters and brothers of any race or religion. Foremost is the responsibility to protect our nation’s – and the world’s – rapidly dwindling fresh water resources.
When GIWA first began working with the historic SBM, half of the nation’s population was defecating in the open. The myriad reasons spanned from lack of access to lack of capacity to lack of awareness and understanding. Additionally, and quite significantly, hundreds of millions of people simply didn’t understand why a toilet was necessary in the first place. When they, their parents and grandparents and everyone they knew defecated outside, why change?
At the time, more children under the age of five were dying in India than anywhere else in the world, mostly due to poor WASH conditions. Nearly 7 per cent of the country’s GDP was being lost due to poor WASH, mainly from all the deaths and sick days taken by the millions of men, women and children impacted.
Understanding that it is to faith leaders that people turn for direction, GIWA launched a progressive campaign to motivate, educate and mobilize the masses. In so doing, GIWA brought together leaders of all faiths, political leaders, renowned entertainers, community leaders and many others to motivate the masses to build toilets and embrace their universal use.
Over the next few years, GIWA, in partnership with SBM, UNICEF and others, organized large summits, conferences and motivating panels at huge events in Uttarakhand, Ladakh, Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and other locations to change the way faith leaders and followers think about sanitation and cleanliness. With slogans like ‘Meditation and Sanitation must go together’, ‘Sanitation IS Meditation’, and ‘Toilets before Temples’, we have been able to align the work of faith with the march towards a Swachh Bharat.
We also created a grand social movement called the ‘Swachhta Kranti’ (Clean Revolution), which was designed to empower and mobilize the people of India to be the change as an act of faith … to commit themselves, tann, mann and dhan, to a swachh, sundar and swasth Bharat.
The inspiration has overflowed into the work of faith leaders across India, as we encouraged them to take up the cause of building toilets and providing clean water and better hygiene. And the inspiration spread to families and communities as they heard the words of their own beloved leaders, which they began to follow like gospel.
Additionally, in order to give people the inspiration, tools and knowledge they need in order to realize their goals, GIWA – along with our many dedicated partners – launched several on-ground initiatives, including World Toilet College, the WaterSchool programme, Women for WASH Initiative, WASH on Wheels travelling roadshows, the Menstrual Hygiene Management Campaign, and much more.
Some of GIWA’s recent initiatives are highlighted below:
Major Summits and Mass Events
To realize the goals of SBM, GIWA brought together India’s foremost faith leaders for and during mass events. We’ve inspired millions at all four Kumbha Melas through hundreds of programmes that have seen the participation of revered faith leaders, entertainers and political leaders including the President and Vice President of India. Together, we’ve led rallying calls for toilets across the nation, in our historic Worship for WASH and Women for WASH Summits, You are the Solution Summits, the Summit of Grace, the Gandhian Resurgence Summit, the Summit of Solutions for the River Ganga, grand kathas, and mass faith events across the nation and around the world. With national, sometimes global, broadcast, our summits and events have impacted the hearts and minds of millions for a clean and healthy India as a call of faith.
According to an independent study of GIWA’s Swachhta Kranti campaign at the Ujjain Kumbha Mela, for example, an estimated 17.5 lakh people were exposed to and impacted by our messages during just the month-long Mela alone. Millions more were impacted at our recent campaigns at the Prayagraj Kumbha Mela.
ODF Nalanda
In a historic, nearly six-month long campaign, GIWA’s team inspired, educated and mobilized the masses in over 300 villages and cities through our unique WASH on Wheels Travelling Theatres. Every day hundreds, sometimes many thousands, were inspired by our puppet shows, audience interactions, screenings of inspirational videos, youth rallies, community leadership meetings and more within their own cities and villages. These grand events were followed by classes held in collaboration with the state government, local authorities and local populations, to directly address the issues that were preventing communities from reaching SBM goals.
During the campaign, it was estimated that over a million people were impacted. In that short span of time, we also educated more than 800 faith leaders, community leaders, teachers, masons and swachhagrahis in classrooms by our instructors. Working with the state of Bihar, we also provided five-day trainings for all of the state’s ZSBPs and state SBM Coordinators. We also worked with the state of Bihar and UNICEF to educate scores of jeevika leaders for a ten-day Training by GIWA as Master Instructors for Sanitation Ambassadors.
Shortly after the conclusion of our campaign, Nalanda district was officially declared Open Defecation Free (ODF).
In evaluations hand-completed by over 13,300 respondents
The World Toilet College
GIWA’s World Toilet College was inaugurated in India in 2016, with the mandate of providing the finest of courses, delivered by expert educators. Our aim is to enable community members and professionals to become Change Leaders who can motivate, mobilize and educate people towards successfully and sustainably meeting SBM goals.
In partnership with Reckitt Benckiser’s Banega Swachh India and in affiliation with the World Toilet Organization, some 6,500 people have been educated by the World Toilet College, led by GIWA’s Secretariat since its inauguration, including Government employees, PHED (Public Health Engineering Department) water engineers, academics, pradhans, swachhagrahis, citizen sanitation ambassadors, masons, environmentalists, jeevika leaders, schoolteachers, faith leaders, and more in workshops and classes designed towards ensuring successful ODF Plus results.
WaterSchool: Educating, Inspiring and Building WASH Facilities
Our WaterSchool programme, in partnership with Swarovski, was launched to educate and inspire the schoolchildren of the Ganga-Himalayas through daily classroom sessions conducted by GIWA educators. In addition, GIWA is actively providing poor and needy schools – particularly government schools – WASH facilities and the repairs they need in order to ensure the health and well-being of all students. These include toilets, handwashing stations, piped water, water-supply cisterns, water-saving gardens, tree planting, emergency infrastructure repairs, and more.
Throughout the year, our WaterSchool programme also organizes special activities that bring schools and communities together for the improvement of their WASH conditions and for the achievement of SBM goals. These include mass clean-ups, tree planting drives, the celebration of special events such as World Water Day, teacher training workshops, participation in mass GIWA summits and more.
Women for WASH
GIWA’s Women for WASH programme enables women from villages and slums to become WASH entrepreneurs. Together, they learn to build toilets, handwashing stations and other WASH needs, as well as how to help their neighbours and local schools embrace SBM goals as Sanitation Ambassadors.
Menstrual Hygiene Management Campaign
Proper menstrual hygiene can result in improved health and socio-economic possibilities for millions of women and girls. To enable this, a culture shift is needed, to extinguish harmful stigmas, while enabling the spread of crucial information and the provision of proper facilities.
GIWA, in partnership with Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, launched a 360 Degree Social Impact Approach geared towards inspiring an end to stigmas while providing crucial instruction for the proper management of menstrual hygiene. This campaign was launched at a massive event in the Prayagraj Kumbha Mela and quickly became widely recognized for the key role it played in inspiring, educating and mobilizing. It will now continue throughout the year in order to inspire tens of thousands more.
The Future Calls
Over the last five years, India has made history. Today, most of the nation can proudly consider itself Open Defecation Free. The statistics of numbers of deaths due to diarrhoea and number of people who defecate in the open are plummeting so quickly that last year’s statistics are already outdated. The World Health Organization estimates that over 3,07,000 diarrhoeal deaths in India will have been prevented by 2019 due to the improved sanitation under SBM. For this, our nation should be proud, as should all who made this great and mighty dream an on-ground reality.
However, the war has not been won yet, as our population burgeons and both national and global water resources continue to dwindle. We will all need to stay united to ensure that toilets stay in use, and that further SBM goals, including for solid and liquid waste management, are met.
It is our patriotic duty to continue to strengthen the already great and historic SBM efforts of our honourable Prime Minister, who has already been acclaimed as an Earth Champion, and it’s now time for every citizen of India to become an Earth Champion. The power of faith in this mission is tremendous.