Launched on 2 October 2014, Gandhi's birth anniversary, the Swachh Bharat Mission set out to end open defecation and to establish scientific municipal solid-waste management. Its urban component, run by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs across roughly 4,000 statutory towns, funded household and community toilets, waste segregation and processing, legacy dumpsite remediation and the elimination of insanitary latrines and manual scavenging. From 2016 the annual Swachh Survekshan survey ranked cities publicly on cleanliness, turning sanitation into a competitive measure of municipal performance. SBM-Urban 2.0, launched on 1 October 2021, targets "garbage-free" cities together with faecal-sludge and used-water management by 2026.
SBM is the largest sanitation programme ever attempted anywhere, and it returned toilets, drainage and solid waste - the nineteenth-century agenda of urban reform - to the centre of Indian urban policy. Whatever the problems of its measurement, Swachh Survekshan created the first routine national comparison of municipal performance and changed how Indian city governments are judged.
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