A Hindsight on PM Modi’s Initiative
Narendra Modi is considered a “savior” to some when it comes to the development and advancements India has been seeing ever since his inauguration in 2014. He has taken note of all the inefficiencies India has identified and set aside many different plans in order to mitigate those negative effects. Indian news outlet “The Times of India”, makes sure to cover every good effect he has had in this country. But, in order to truly measure the effectiveness of Modi’s initiatives, let’s compare a very bold initiative he claimed, Toilets before Temples, which prioritized the building of toilets and sanitation services in multiple locations across India.
To measure this initiative, I will look at the data presented by “SocialStory”, a news outlet that has covered a plethora of Modi’s valiant efforts and will pin it head to head with data retrieved from the World Bank. This data consists of many different measurements spanning from 2014 to 2020, such as the percentage of the population that has access to basic sanitation stations, and the percentage of the population who have access to clean drinking water. Modi has always had the necessity to act but by double-checking his effectiveness in his initiative, we can provide a call to action and give insights on how to fully optimize the well-being of the many residents of India.
An article from “SocialStory” that was written by Tenzin Norzom displays Modi’s efforts during his time as Prime Minister. One of the efforts mentioned in this article had the tagline “Toilets before temples”. Modi simply put that he wanted to build accessible toilets before he would build more temples. He would implement this task in a larger mission called the Swachh Bharat Mission, which was a campaign launched by the Prime minister to place importance on achieving universal sanitation coverage and to put the focus on the cleanliness of the people and environment. This initiative cost over nine crores equivalent to about 1.1 million USD.
In order to measure the efficacy of this initiative, let’s first look at a bar chart showing the % of the population using the least basic sanitation services provided by the World Bank that measures World Development Indicators.
We can see there is a steady increase of about 3% each year but nothing extraordinary. There is something worth mentioning in the “SocialStory” article, that this initiative resulted in over 32 states or Union Territories being open defecation-free since 2014. There has to be a slight disconnect between that statement and the data, due to the fact that only 53% of the population of India had access to basic sanitation stations like toilets. But this can boil down to the interpretation of this World Bank data, namely, an increase in basic sanitation could not necessarily mean a decrease in open defecation rates. We see steady growth, but in order to make a bold claim like that we would need to see larger percentage growths yearly.
To dive deeper, there is data that shows the percentage of the population that has “safely” managed sanitation services. For example, having janitorial services provided to these sanitation facilities.
In this chart, we see a smaller percentage of the population that has access to this “upgraded” amenity compared to the basic sanitation service, and we see a smaller growth rate per year at around 2% between the years 2014–2020. This tells me that Modi is making an effort to build more toilets/sanitation facilities but did the bare minimum and went the easy, convenient route.
Looking at the bigger picture of his mission of having an emphasis on cleanliness, The World Bank provided another metric of the percentage of people with basic handwashing facilities that include soap and water.
One would think that this metric would see large increases, but we see that there has been a .5% growth in 6 years…
This is quite disappointing and at the end of the day, we need to prioritize the people of India and ensure their safety. A recommendation would be implementing an initiative to have more hand-washing facilities in common places in order to increase the percentage growth in the population that has access to these kinds of facilities. There also needs to be some sort of education in regard to sanitation and also incentives that can drive growth in accessibility. It truly comes down to the individual and there cannot be any shortcuts taken.
