Opinion | PM Modi's 12-Year Return On A Clean India

Political ownership and verified results together made Swachh Bharat the public health achievement of Modi's 12 years

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On October 2, 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept a lane in Delhi’s Valmiki Basti and launched the Swachh Bharat Mission, setting Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary five years later as the deadline to end open defecation. Rural sanitation coverage stood at 39 per cent that day, and about 55 crore people in villages were defecating in the open.

Government data now count 12.22 crore toilets built in rural homes. The return on those toilets is best measured in the money, working days and children’s lives that poor sanitation used to take, and on that measure Swachh Bharat ranks among the largest public health interventions any country has run.

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In 2010, the Water and Sanitation Program, a World Bank-administered partnership, estimated that inadequate sanitation cost India $53.8 billion in 2006, equal to 6.4 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product that year. Premature deaths and disease made up $38.5 billion of that sum, and most of the remainder was productive time lost in reaching a field or a shared latrine. The poorest fifth of urban households bore the highest losses per head, which meant that the cost of the arrangement fell on the people least able to absorb it.

In 2018, the World Health Organisation modelled the mission’s health effects at the request of the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation. Before the mission, unsafe........

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