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The real test of Swachh Bharat now lies in what people do when nobody is watching.
Drive into almost any Indian town today and you are likely to see a mural near the entrance. It may show a broom, the words “Swachh Bharat” in large letters, or a message about cleanliness. Some of these walls are freshly painted. Others have faded with time, with chipped paint and dust covering parts of the message. Yet they still point to a promise that began more than a decade ago.
When the Modi government launched the Swachh Bharat Mission in October 2014, the problem was difficult to ignore. Open defecation was common in large parts of rural India. Garbage was often dumped in the open. Waste collection and disposal systems in many towns were inadequate. Cleanliness had become something people spoke about, but often did little about in their daily lives.
Ten years on, the picture is more complicated. There has been visible progress, particularly in sanitation and public awareness. At the same time, many of the problems that existed in 2014 have not disappeared. They have changed in form, or moved from one place to another.
The most obvious measure of progress is the construction of toilets. The government has highlighted the construction of more than ten crore household toilets in rural India during the early years of the mission. That is a substantial expansion of sanitation infrastructure.
The bigger question is what happened after those toilets were built? A toilet in a house does not automatically change behaviour. It needs water, maintenance and regular use. In some communities, people continued to avoid using toilets because of water shortages, poor construction, maintenance problems or habits developed over generations.
Even with these limitations, the change across rural India is difficult to dismiss. Millions of households that once had no private toilet now have one. Several studies have also recorded a significant decline in open defecation. There may be differences between studies over the exact scale of the decline, but the broader change is evident.
Urban waste has become one of the biggest tests for municipal administrations. Anyone living in a growing Indian city has seen the familiar cycle. A market becomes crowded, a festival ends, or a busy weekend passes, and piles of waste begin appearing along roadsides and in public spaces. Empty plots, drains, lakes and corners of markets often become unofficial dumping grounds.
There are rules for waste segregation. Households are expected to separate wet and dry waste. Municipal workers are expected to collect it and take it to appropriate facilities. Yet implementation remains inconsistent in many places.
The problem is partly about infrastructure. Waste generation has increased as cities have grown and consumption has risen. Processing plants, recycling systems, composting facilities and scientific landfill management have not expanded at the same pace everywhere.
It is also a problem of enforcement and public behaviour.
Kashmir offers a useful example. The region has a fragile environment and a geography that makes waste management particularly difficult. Dal Lake receives considerable attention because of its ecological and economic importance. Cleaning projects, conservation programmes and public campaigns have been carried out repeatedly. Yet the problems continue to surface.
Waste entering the lake, untreated sewage, construction activity and other forms of pollution continue to put pressure on the water body. The issue is not the absence of campaigns. It is the difficulty of maintaining consistent action after public attention moves elsewhere.
The same pattern can be seen in some tourist destinations. Gulmarg, Pahalgam and Sonamarg receive large numbers of visitors during the tourist season. More visitors mean greater pressure on roads, public spaces and waste collection systems. Plastic bottles, food packaging and other discarded material can quickly accumulate when local infrastructure is unable to handle the volume.
Authorities have responded with restrictions on single-use plastics, additional bins, cleanliness drives and awareness campaigns. Some measures have produced visible results. But the scale of the problem means that temporary drives cannot provide a permanent solution.
This is where the question of behaviour becomes important. A government can construct a toilet. It can install a dustbin. It can arrange waste collection and build a processing facility. It can also launch an awareness campaign.
It cannot stand beside every person throughout the day and tell them where to throw a wrapper.
That decision belongs to the individual. Throwing a plastic bottle from a moving vehicle may take two seconds. Leaving a food packet on a park bench takes even less. Such actions may appear insignificant when viewed individually, but repeated across thousands of people, they create a serious public problem.
The Swachh Bharat Mission has invested heavily in awareness. Schools have introduced cleanliness activities. Public spaces have carried messages about sanitation. Campaigns have used celebrities, officials and public figures to promote the idea that cleanliness is a shared responsibility. The message has reached people. Cleanliness is discussed more openly today than it was before the mission began.
But awareness and behaviour are two different things. A person may know that littering is wrong and still throw rubbish onto the road. A household may understand waste segregation and still put all its waste into one bag. A shopkeeper may support a clean market and continue using plastic packaging because it is convenient and inexpensive. Changing such habits takes time.There are places where communities have taken matters into their own hands. Some residential areas have introduced composting systems. Some schools have made waste management part of everyday routines. Businesses and voluntary organisations have supported lake, river and neighbourhood clean-up projects.
These examples matter because they show that cleanliness can work when responsibility does not end with a government department. However, such efforts remain uneven. One neighbourhood may maintain a good waste system while another nearby struggles with overflowing bins. One school may teach students to segregate waste while another treats cleanliness as an annual activity.
India’s size and diversity make a single solution difficult. Conditions in a major metropolitan city are different from those in a small town. A tourist destination faces different pressures from an agricultural village. The same approach cannot work everywhere. This is why the legacy of Swachh Bharat should not be measured only through the number of toilets built or the number of cleanliness drives conducted.
Those figures matter. Infrastructure matters. Public investment matters But the long-term success of the mission will depend on what happens after the campaign banners come down.
Do people continue to use toilets? Do households separate their waste? Do municipalities collect and process that waste properly? Do shopkeepers and consumers reduce unnecessary plastic use? Do visitors leave tourist destinations without leaving their waste behind?
These questions will determine whether the changes of the past decade become permanent. Swachh Bharat has clearly changed the conversation around sanitation and cleanliness in India. It has brought toilets, waste management and public hygiene into the national discussion. It has also created infrastructure that did not exist in many communities before 2014.
Habits formed over decades cannot disappear through slogans alone. They require consistent enforcement, reliable public services and repeated effort at the community level. They also require individuals to accept that public cleanliness is part of their own responsibility.
Those faded Swachh Bharat murals found across Indian towns may therefore carry a different message today. They are reminders of what has already been achieved, but also of the work that remains. The next stage will be less about launching another campaign and more about maintaining the standards already promised. Cleanliness has to become routine. At home. At school. In the market. On the road. In tourist areas.
mdmuslimbhat@gmail.com
