Breaking down the question
This question has two clearly signposted parts. The first asks you to discuss the implications of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan — its social, sanitary and cultural consequences, both positive and problematic. The second asks a conceptual question: does civil society have a role to play, and it insists that you substantiate the answer with examples. A script that describes the programme but neglects the civil society debate, or that asserts a role without illustration, will lose marks.
The topic — politics and society in India — signals that the examiner wants you to read sanitation as a site where the state, the market and civil society meet. The programme is not merely an infrastructure drive but an attempt at behavioural and cultural change, and that is where sociology enters.
How to approach it
Begin by framing the abhiyan as more than toilet construction — as an intervention in public health, dignity and social attitudes. Discuss its implications across several dimensions: sanitation and health, the dignity of those historically burdened with cleaning work, gender, and the difficulty of changing entrenched behaviour.
Then define civil society and argue, using a Gramscian framing, that behavioural change of this scale cannot be achieved by the state alone. Substantiate with concrete kinds of actors — NGOs, community organisations, self-help groups, schools and religious bodies. Close by weighing achievements against limitations and pointing to the unfinished agenda of caste and manual scavenging.
Model answer
The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, launched in 2014, sought to make India open-defecation free and to transform attitudes towards cleanliness and sanitation. Its implications extend well beyond the building of toilets. In public health terms, improved sanitation is linked to reductions in diarrhoeal disease, child undernutrition and mortality, so the programme carries real potential to improve population health. Symbolically, it placed sanitation — long a neglected and stigmatised subject — at the centre of national attention, and connected it to the figure of Gandhi, for whom cleanliness and the dignity of labour were moral concerns.
The programme also has a profound bearing on caste and dignity. Sanitation work in India has historically been assigned to the lowest castes, and the persistence of manual scavenging represents one of the gravest continuing indignities in Indian society. A sanitation drive that builds toilets without mechanising their cleaning, or without confronting the caste division of labour, risks reproducing the very hierarchy it should dissolve. Andre Beteille's insistence that caste inequality is embedded in the division of labour is relevant here: durable change requires attention to who cleans, not only to what is built.
The gendered implications are significant. Safe, private toilets bear directly on the safety, dignity and health of women and girls, and access to sanitation is closely tied to school attendance among adolescent girls. Yet the greatest challenge the programme faces is behavioural. Building a toilet does not guarantee its use, and the abhiyan repeatedly encountered the gap between infrastructure and habit — the persistence of open defecation even where facilities existed.
It is precisely this behavioural dimension that establishes the indispensable role of civil society. Civil society, in the Gramscian sense, is the sphere of associational life between the state and the family — the domain in which values, consent and norms are formed. Habits of hygiene are cultural, not merely technical, and the state can build and exhort but cannot easily reach into the everyday practices of households. Civil society can.
Concrete examples substantiate this. Non-governmental organisations working on water and sanitation have driven community-led approaches that generate collective commitment to becoming open-defecation free rather than relying on subsidy alone. Self-help groups and women's collectives have been central to sustaining toilet use and maintaining village-level cleanliness. Schools have functioned as sites of behavioural change, with children carrying messages of hygiene into their homes. Religious and community leaders have lent moral authority to the cause, and local voluntary bodies have monitored and maintained facilities where the administrative machinery could not reach. Discussion of how such organised interests and voluntary associations mediate between state and society appears in the notes on political parties, pressure groups and the elite.
At the same time, civil society engagement has its limits. Where mobilisation was thin, coercion and social pressure sometimes substituted for genuine persuasion, and the caste question at the heart of sanitation work often went unaddressed. The abhiyan thus demonstrates both the necessity and the difficulty of partnership between the state and civil society.
The considered conclusion is that the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan carries substantial implications for health, dignity and gender, and that civil society is not an optional add-on but a condition of its success, precisely because durable behavioural and cultural change lies beyond the direct reach of the state.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners look for both parts answered with equal seriousness. The strongest scripts treat the abhiyan as a social intervention — engaging health, caste dignity, gender and the stubborn problem of behaviour — rather than merely praising it. On civil society, a clear conceptual definition, ideally Gramscian, followed by concrete and varied examples, is what earns marks; the word substantiate in the question is a direct instruction. Raising the unresolved question of manual scavenging shows critical depth, and a balanced conclusion that recognises both the promise and the limits of state-society partnership secures a top-band answer.