Swachh Bharat Mission Drives Significant Reductions in Infant Mortality Rates in India
Context:
Recently, a multidisciplinary science journal named NATURE, has highlighted the impact of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) on reducing infant and under-five mortality rates in India.
Relevance:
GS-02 (Government policies and interventions)
About Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM):
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It is mass movement launched in 2014.
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It aimed to achieve Clean India by 2019.
- The mission is one of India’s largest national sanitation programs aimed at eliminating open defecation and improving public health.
- The mission operated in various phases for both Urban and Rural.
- Urban:
- Phase-1: Mainly focusing Urban areas, it covered more than 1 crore households to provide 2.5 lakh community toilets and solid waste management facility in each town.
- Phase-2: This envisioned to make all cities ‘Garbage Free’ by focusing on source segregation of solid waste, utilizing the principles of 3Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle).
- Rural:
- Phase-1: Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan was restructured into the Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin). It focused to ensure cleanliness in India and make it Open Defecation Free (ODF) in Five Years.
- Phase 2: Having achieved the milestone of an ODF India in a time bound manner in 2019, this focused on sanitation and the behaviour change campaign to sustain the achievements made under phase-1.
- The study, conducted by leading global experts, presents robust evidence linking improved sanitation under SBM to better child survival outcomes.
Key Highlights of the study:
- The study reveals that the Mission has been instrumental in averting 60,000 to 70,000 infant deaths annually across India.
- The study highlighted that with every 10 percentage point increase in district-level toilet access, there is an average reduction of 0.9 points in IMR and 1.1 points in U5MR.
- Districts with over 30% toilet coverage under SBM has shown greater reductions by dropping IMR to 5.3 and U5MR to 6.8 per thousand live births.
- The study highlights the comprehensive approach of SBM that combines extensive toilet construction alongside investments in information, education, and communication (IEC) that played a critical role in transforming public behavior.
- The study also points out that the increase in toilet access under SBM likely contributed to reducing exposure to fecal-oral pathogens, thereby decreasing the incidences of diarrhea and malnutrition—two significant drivers of child mortality in India.
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