3 Steps To Improve Rural Sanitation In India — A Pathway To Scale And Sustainability

Maintaining hygiene and sanitation is extremely important as that promotes a healthy lifestyle. Everyone deserves clean drinking water, proper healthcare facilities, and other such necessities. It is important to spread awareness about the importance of sanitation and cleanliness as when one maintains a hygienic lifestyle, a lot of issues get resolved not only from the health perspective but also changes one as a person.

An initiative was launched by the Government of India in 2014, which aimed at eradicating open defecation and improving solid waste management in India. This initiative is called the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan or Clean India Mission. Under Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, many subprograms and initiatives were also proposed so that every part of the country could avail of the programs and the benefits that they provided. One such sub-program was the Swachh Bharat Mission Gramin, which aimed at providing sanitation and hygiene facilities in rural places.

Sanitation in India itself is a very big issue. Many houses still do not have toilets installed at their houses. These problems are much more prevalent in rural areas than in urban areas hence it is extremely important to pay attention to the problems associated with rural sanitation in India.

Here are three steps to improve rural sanitation in India:
1. Government’s involvement in improving sanitation in rural places: The government must pay more attention to the problems that arise in rural areas concerning sanitation and hygiene. The issues must be solved at the local levels first. Once the government is committed to doing so, there will be a lot of changes that can be seen. For example, local awareness campaigns are the first step towards change. People need to understand the importance of sanitation first to inculcate it in their lives.
2. Providing aid and technical support at the district level: Once these measures and initiatives are understood by the district authorities and are provided with the required aid, it is now their responsibility to make sure these aids and initiatives are properly availed by the local people in villages which come under their districts.
3. Supporting the state government: If a particular state’s government has effective plans and ideas in promoting and improving sanitation in their respective state, their ideas must be taken into consideration and those ideas must be worked upon if they seem to be the real, effective deal.