Swachh Bharat: Teaching grown-ups how to keep their surroundings clean

Teaching grown-ups in India how to keep their surroundings clean is quite a task. The government has spent crore of rupees on the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM or Clean India Mission). The government says the rural sanitation coverage of India has now risen to 85% under the world's largest "behaviour change" programme.

A report in Mint, however, says the data is too good to be true.

If these numbers sound too good to be true, they are most likely to be quite off the mark. A new study by a team from the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE) suggests that 44% of the rural population in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan still defecate in the open. However, according to SBM, the three states are either fully or largely open-defecation free, except for Bihar.

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