Swachh Bharat Mission

A nationwide sanitation campaign launched by the Government of India in October 2014, seeking to eliminate open defecation and improve solid waste management across both rural and urban India through subsidized household toilet construction, behavior-change communication and community monitoring. It built on and expanded an earlier Total Sanitation Campaign. The government declared rural India open-defecation-free in October 2019, citing more than 100 million household toilets built under the mission's first phase, and launched a second phase from 2020 targeting sustained use and solid and liquid waste management. Independent household surveys have found a meaningful share of the newly built toilets going unused or not consistently used, and researchers and journalists have disputed both the pace and the completeness of the claimed behavior change.