Opinion | How the Swachh Bharat Mission is nudging people to use toilets

Looking back at the over four years of Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) implementation, I realised that, in many ways, the SBM has endeavoured to practise what Richard Thaler, the 2017 Nobel Prize winning economist, preached on behavioural economics and, in particular, on the art of “nudging” — how small interventions can help individuals or communities to change behaviour. The SBM has been, at a scale unimaginable to Thaler, nudging rural communities in India to change their habit of open defecation by using household toilets.

A couple of recent commentaries on the SBM have shown that some researchers have not understood the programme’s focus on positive behaviour change. The SBM, with its primary objective of ending open defecation, was based on the premise that sanitation was a public good, with significant positive externalities such as health, economic and gender empowerment benefits. The challenge we faced was in getting individuals and communities in rural India to choose this two in one product :toilet plus behaviour change.

Combining individual choice with the government’s decision to try and persuade people to stop defecating in the open, by using individual household toilets, could be termed, as Thaler and co-author Sunstein call “libertarian paternalism”. They argue that it is perfectly acceptable for both private institutions and governments to “steer people’s choices in directions which will improve their lives”.

“Nudging” is the preferred instrument recommended by the Nobel Prize winning author and this is precisely what was attempted under the SBM. Thaler defines nudging as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives”. Under the SBM, open defecating behaviour was sought to be altered by both mass media “nudge” interventions such as the Darwaza Band TV and radio campaign led by SBM ambassador, Amitabh Bachchan, as well as the ground game of interpersonal communication through “triggering” by 580,000 grassroots motivators called swachhagrahis.

One of the fundamental challenges faced by the SBM in the early implementation phase was the fact that rural communities, in many cases, were not aware that defecating in the open was a “public bad”. Thaler and Sunstein term this as “pluralistic ignorance”, where communities “may follow a practice or a tradition not because [they] like it, but merely because [they] think that most other people like it.” In the case of open defecation in India, this came out of deeply ingrained social behaviour practised over centuries, which had become a communally accepted norm. The Bollywood movie, Toilet Ek Prem Katha, illustrates this perfectly as the young bride who is used to having and using a toilet at her parent’s home, is now, after marriage, expected to follow the social practice of open defecation through the “lota party” communal open defecation practice by the village women in her new home.

Understanding from early experiences, the SBM practised “nudging” at a scale unprecedented in the world: 550 million people practising open defecation in rural India were to be nudged into changing their behaviour to using the toilets provided under the programme. The ministry of drinking water and sanitation adapted various behaviour change techniques such as Robert Chambers’ Participatory Rural Appraisal techniques and Community Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) into a tool called “Community Approaches to Sanitation”. The focus here was on nudging the community rather than the individual, to develop ownership and accountability to become open defecation free (ODF) by the village as a whole through peer pressure.

Getting communities out of what Thaler and Sunstein term the “status quo bias” was challenging and it took many community meetings with persistent follow up to “trigger” the shift in behaviour. One nudge which was consistently used by swachhagrahis was to use “disgust” as a tool to incentivise the community to stop defecating in the open. The common technique was to make people aware that they were, in practice, eating their own and their neighbours’ excreta when they defecated in the open since flies sat on excreta in open spaces and then sat on the food they ate. Such a nudge was effective when persistently applied. Many other nudges were also applied, including the use of “gandhigiri” where members of the community “nigrani samiti” would politely offer a namaste, a polite smile and a flower to those who defied the community’s mandate of preventing open defecation. Such nudges worked well and, only in rare cases, crossed the line from nudging to something a little more top down.

With rural sanitation coverage having dramatically increased from 39% at the start of the SBM in October 2014 to over 98% today, the challenge now is to sustain the ODF behaviour achieved over the past four years. While Thaler and Sunstein provide many examples of simple nudges to change behaviour, they do not have any examples of solutions to nudge people to sustain their changed behaviour over time.

This is what the SBM is currently focusing on and we have come up with a few proxy “nudge” ideas of our own to sustain the changed behaviour, including providing financial incentives to communities and districts to remain ODF, setting in place institutional mechanisms (e.g. village and Block watch and ward committees etc). Perhaps Thaler could develop Nudge 2.0 theory on sustaining behaviour change by studying the social revolution taking place in India under the SBM.

Parameswaran Iyer, is secretary, ministry of drinking water and sanitation

The views expressed are personal