The clock is counting down to 2nd October 2019, the Government of India’s date to eradicate open defecation. It is quickly becoming clear the Government is looking at how to consolidate gains made in the past few years on sanitation and not being undone by slippages. As the mission has progressed, the sanitation coverage of rural India has increased to 94.73% and 19 states and UTS, 432 districts and 422,650 villages have been declared as open defecation-free (ODF). Still, there is need to construct as many 148 million toilets in one year (SBM MIS, 2018).

A regional Rapid Action Learning (RAL) workshop to share, learn and plan for the implementation of Swachh Bharat Mission with quality and sustainability was organised by the state government of Jharkhand with the support of Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Ranchi on 18-19 September 2018.

This WEDC conference paper focuses on an Immersive Research Approach designed by Praxis, IDS and WaterAid whereby researchers lived in villages in recently declared open defecation free districts, to gain an in-depth understanding of ground realities and community perspectives of the Swachh Bharat Mission-Gramin. The study shed light on key aspects and dynamics influencing local ownership, behaviour change and construction quality, and also revealed multifaceted exclusion processes.

Around 2.3 billion people in developing countries still lack access to improved sanitation facilities and almost one billion practice open defecation (OD). Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) has recently become a particularly popular approach used in more than 60 countries. It is a behaviour change approach that aims to ignite community action and make OD socially unacceptable without providing any external financial or material support to individual households. Also sometimes perceived as a revolutionary approach that has proven to be highly cost-effective in abolishing OD.