ICT perspectives on sanitation improvements under Swachh Bharat Abhiyan Aman Sinha1 and Puranjay Sharma2 University School of Information and Communication Technology, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Sector-16C, Dwarka, New Delhi 110078 1
[email protected] 2
[email protected]
Abstract— Adequate sanitation facilities are widely considered to be one of the key underpinnings to public health in the modern scenario. Studies suggest that poor sanitation is responsible for up to 4% of global deaths and 5.7% of the worldwide disease burden [1]. Well-developed sanitation arrangements bring benefits related not only to public health, but also promote gender equality. In spite of rapid progress in multiple spheres of human development, India faces considerable challenges in providing widespread access to sanitation facilities. The government's Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, launched in October 2014, seeks to bring about broad improvements in this regard which are both inclusive and visible. However, with an estimated 594 million Indians lacking adequate access to sanitary facilities[2], this campaign faces significant implementation challenges, and risks being stymied due to a fragmented administrative environment and an information deficit faced by stakeholders. By revisiting previous and existing efforts in this area across the world, this paper seeks to show how the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools could result in higher quality and timelier decisionmaking, thus improving the overall implementation outcome of government and private sector intervention in this area. I. INTRODUCTION Inadequate access to sanitation in the modern world is largely a concern faced by lower-income countries today. Globally, inadequate access to proper sanitation contributes significantly to the global disease burden, resulting in an estimated 1.6 million annual deaths and accounting for the loss of nearly 61 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) [3]. India is home to by far the largest number of people who practice open defecation and do not have access to proper sanitation [4]. The launch of the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade in 1980 ensured that the Sixth Five Year Plan of India (1980-85) attended to the issue of Rural Sanitation in India aggressively. The responsibility for rural sanitation at the Central level was passed on to the Rural Development Department from the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation in this period.
Since 1986, the Indian government has launched several campaigns to address this issue, resulting in mixed success so far. The first of these was the Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) launched in 1986 by the Rural Development Department. The CRSP's main aim was to end open defecation by means of construction of household toilets through hardware subsidies. The focus was on promotion of only Double pit pour flush model of toilets to generate demand. It envisaged that sanitation in India would be achieved by the construction of these household toilets and an investment of the tune of Rs. 660 crore was made in this regard and over 90 lakh latrines were constructed. Unfortunately, rural sanitation grew at just 1 percent annually throughout the 1990s and the Census of 2001 showed that only 22 percent of rural households had access to toilets. In light of the poor performance of the CRSP, the government of India restructured the program to make it a “demanddriven, community-led approach to total sanitation” and called it the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC). With this program, it was realised that construction of toilets does not automatically translate into an exponential rise in the usage of toilets. In 2003, the government of India introduced The Nirmal Gram Puraskar which offered fiscal incentives in the form of cash rewards to local governments that achieve 100% sanitation in their area. The criteria to be declared as a 100% sanitation area was to be a 100% Open Defacement Free area and an area which had tackled the issues of solid and liquid waste management. The underlining feature of the evolution of the Indian sanitation program has been the paradigm shift to the incentive model from the subsidy model. The system of providing postachievement incentives has proved to be a success and the Nirmal Gram Puraskar has seen a great response by the masses. In the year of its inception in 2005, only 4 such awards were given but over the course of the next 5 years, till 2010, as per the Department of Drinking Water Supply, a staggering 22,000 such awards were given out. The award in itself raised the status of a panchayat and it proved to be a catalyst in generating peer pressure among the neighboring panchayats. In this way, it was also ensured that there was competition and urgency on all levels of the administration. However, even after the limited success of the above mentioned programs, India still does not fare well on
sanitation indicators. Rapid urbanization and continuous population increment has resulted in increase in waste production in Urban Areas which the civic bodies have been unable to manage. In light of the above factors, the Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi on October 2, 2014 declared that after five years when India shall celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation, we should be a 100% sanitation nation in an effort to drive out behavioral change in the people and also to motivate the administration and civic bodies. II. BACKGROUND A. Metrics In order to improve comparability in access to sanitation across countries, so-called improved sanitation facilities are currently treated as a baseline standard for sanitary access. An improved sanitation facility (ISF) is a sanitation facility that hygienically separates human excreta from human contact [5]. Specifically, WHO considers the following categories of sanitation facilities to be ‘improved’: [5] 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Flush toilets Connection to a piped sewer system Connection to a septic system Flush / pour-flush to a pit latrine Ventilated improved pit (VIP) latrine Composting toilet
Recognizing sanitation as a key aspect of development, the Indian government in 1999 launched the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) with an elaborate administrative structure (Fig.1), aiming at the following goals: 1. 2. 3. 4.
5. 6. 7.
Bring about an improvement in the general quality of life in the rural areas. Generate felt demand for sanitation facilities through awareness creation and health education. Accelerate sanitation coverage in rural areas. Cover schools/Anganwadis in rural areas with sanitation facilities and promote hygiene education and sanitary habits among students. Encourage cost effective and appropriate technologies in sanitation. Eliminate open defecation to minimize risk of contamination of drinking water sources and food. Convert dry latrines to pour flush latrines, and eliminate manual scavenging practice, wherever in existence in rural areas. Figure1: Total Sanitation Program Delivery Structure
B. Global Scenario As with other aspects of human development, there is a significant gap in widespread availability of improved sanitation facilities (ISFs) between high and low-income countries. While high-income countries provide their citizens with universal access to ISFs, the figure drops to a median of 83% and 54% of urban and rural households, respectively, for lower middle-income countries (such as India) and 50% and 28% of urban and rural households, respectively, for lower income countries [6]. Recognizing the fact of this disparity, the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) call upon participating countries to halve the proportion of their national populations without access to ISFs. It also called for improvement in accessibility of drinking water sources by 2015 [7]. Although significant achievements have been made in this area, outcomes have been relatively uneven, and are by-andlarge expected to fall short of the ambitious goals envisaged by the MDGs. C. Indian Scenario Over the last two decades, India has made rapid progress in multiple spheres of human development, including literacy, public health and overall income levels.
Source: Singh, Suseel Samuel, et al. "A Decade of the Total Sanitation Campaign Rapid Assessment of Processes and Outcomes."
D. Progress of Indian Sanitation Program Progress in providing access to ISFs has been fragmented. While the overall number of households with access to ISFs increased from 30% to 51% between 1992 and 2009, this sharp growth obscures a large urban-rural gap in the availability of ISFs. While an estimated 89% of urban households in India had access to ISFs in 2009, the corresponding figure for rural households was a mere 35% [8]. Measurement of progress is somewhat hampered due to conflicting definitions of ISFs. For instance, Indian government sources consider certain public toilets as ISFs, but WHO and other international organisations do not. In general, WHO figures provide a much lower estimate for sanitary access in India, putting the overall number at only 36% in 2012. Regardless of difference in measurement methodology, India’s progress has lagged well behind peers such as China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. [4]
Sciences laboratories of the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). The software so developed should be loaded on any mobile device with GPS and a Camera preferably with an Android Operating System as it's an open source operating system. This shall transform the device into an integrated mapping device which can transmit the data logged onto a central database. This will involve survey of the designated area followed by submission of pictures of the surveyed area to a central database, along with the GPS location of the area. With this type of methodology, the following implementation challenges of shall be addressed 1.
Exact Location shall be available through GPS
2.
Errors in data collection would be minimized through the simplistic touch screen interface.
3.
Monitoring and Evaluation can be done by higher level officers remotely as data is stored on a central database
4.
Providing real time information to the agencies responsible for sanitation
E. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) marks a shift from the exclusively supply-side driven approach of the previous Total Sanitation Campaign to a demand-driven approach executed in conjunction with monetary incentives for toilet construction.
This methodology can also be used in the Nirmal Gram Puraskar Program. It would ensure that only deserving areas get the award. Those areas would be required to maintain the same level of sanitation for receiving further benefits.
Additionally, while the Total Sanitation Campaign saw substantial success in terms of large-scale construction of toilets (output), the success was much more equivocal in terms of actual public health outcomes. SBA seeks to correct this by introducing mechanisms to monitor both output and outcomes.
To ensure proper implementation of our sanitation program, it's essential to make Swacch Bharat Abhiyan a community led program on the lines of the Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) program, which was pioneered by Dr. Kamal Kar of Village Education Resource Centre (VERC) and supported by Water Aid, in a small community of Rajshahi district in Bangladesh in the year 1999.
III. ICT PERSPECTIVES ON THE SWACHH BHARAT ABHIYAN ICT has been envisioned as an integral part of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, and a pilot project to measure household coverage by means of a hand held device (such as a cellular phone) to capture images has already seen some measure of success [9]. Using ICT, decision making and implementation at both rural and local level can be improved greatly through usage of Data Acquisition Systems (DAQ). This would result into forming up of a base for sanitary interventions and improve overall quality of sanitation. As the cost of Information Systems has decreased considerably in the last few years, the government has got a golden chance of integrating Information Systems into their Monitoring and Evaluation Frameworks. For monitoring and evaluation, we propose that the government develops software on the lines of the FLOW (Field Level Operations Watch) software (developed by the NGO - Water for People) which has been used in Liberia for mapping and surveying safe water points on a digital map. Given that FLOW is an Open Source Software, its source code is readily available and the government can direct the Department of Electronics and Information Technology to develop software on the lines of FLOW and use it for surveying the progress of Sanitation Programs. Alternatively the government can give this task to one of the Information
Community Led Total Sanitation, or CLTS, is an approach which facilitates a process of empowering local communities to stop open defecation and to build and use latrines without the support of any external hardware subsidy [12]. The use of ICT for collection of data through the use of mobile phones has been pilot tested in Rajgir block of Nalanda district in Bihar and in the Kandaghat block of Solan district in Himachal Pradesh. It covered the entire rural population of the blocks which was around 23,000 households in about three months. In this pilot, the following data was collected 1.
Economic Status of the Household
2.
Whether the household had a toilet or not
3.
What material was used for hand washing
4.
What method of disposal of child feces was used
5.
Sanitation behavior of each member of the family
6.
Photograph of the family with the toilet or in front of the house
7.
GPS coordinates of the location of the house
The data which was collected was accessible to authorised users who could then view individual or summary results of all parameters. Then using the GPS coordinates, a color coded map of the households was created using Google earth to
show the sanitation status the block, panchayat and villages [11].
Acknowledgment
IV. CONCLUSIONS Global experience with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) initiatives in development projects shows that ICT acts as a strong enabler for key governmental and private sector interventions. However, this potential can be realised only if such projects are implemented sustainably, with due attention paid to local environments, community norms, technology access and political scenario [10]. The reasons for the gaps in implementations can be explained by the fact that the Information Systems are designed according to models of rationality. Even technology is conceived as an objective and rational entity, not as something that incorporates particular political and cultural values [9]. The gap between the rationality of Information Systems design and the political/behavioral realities of developing countries may be summarized by the following table Table 1: Differences between Hard and Soft Models
Dimension
Hard Rational Design
Soft Political Design
Information
Emphasis on standardised, formal, quantitative information
Emphasis on contingent, informal, qualitative information
Technology
A simple enabling mechanism
A complex, valueladen entity: status symbol for some, tool of oppression for others
Processes
Stable, straightforward and formal; decision outcomes as optimal solutions based on logical criteria
Flexible, complex, constrained and often informal; decision outcomes as compromises based on ‘power games’
Objectives and Values
Formal organisational objectives
Multiple, informal, personal objectives
Staffing Skills
and
Staff viewed as rational beings
Staff viewed as political beings
Management Systems and structures
Emphasis on formal, objective processes and structures
Emphasis on informal, subjective processes and structures
Other Resources : Time and Money
Used to achieve organisational objectives
Used to achieve personal objectives
Source: Heeks, Richard, and David Mundy. "10. Information systems and public sector reform in the Third World." The Internationalization of Public Management: Reinventing the Third World State (2001): 196.
The authors would like to acknowledge the aid of the National Knowledge Network and the University Information Resources Centre, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University with which we could seamlessly access various research papers.
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