Nirmal Gram Puraskar

An Indian government award scheme, whose name translates to Clean Village Award, created within the framework of India's Total Sanitation Campaign launched in 1999 to reward villages for eliminating open defecation through community engagement rather than through infrastructure funding alone. A village panchayat, block or district that achieves and sustains open-defecation-free status under the Total Sanitation Campaign's criteria becomes eligible for a Nirmal Gram Puraskar, receiving both a monetary award and prominent public recognition intended to encourage neighboring communities to pursue the same standard. The scheme began in the state of Maharashtra, where more than 2,000 gram panchayats went on to achieve open-defecation-free status and win the award, and it sits within a longer lineage of Indian national sanitation policy that runs from the Central Rural Sanitation Programme of 1986 through the Total Sanitation Campaign of 1999, the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan of 2012 and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan launched in 2014, each stage marking a shift toward treating rural sanitation as a public health priority rather than a purely local infrastructure concern.