The Community Incentive Model: Towards an Open Defecation Free Chhattisgarh

The Indian Governments Swachh Bharat Mission offers a 12,000 rupee incentive to Below Poverty Line and certain Above Poverty Line households without a toilet. However, translating the incentive into successful sanitation improvements has been a challenge. Innovative and customisable ways, ideas and processes are needed to ensure community buy-in and achieve greater ownership of the process and high rates of toilet use in an environmentally safe manner. To date the State of Chhattisgarh has seen great successes in ending open defecation and ensuring usage of toilets. With two districts and over fifty blocks declared ODF, Chhattisgarh has also shown strong commitments to community-led processes and has seen a number of innovations, among them the Community Incentive Method. This method has evolved to meet the specific requirements of the State and has shown promise especially in areas where there is a mix of households who are eligible and those who are not eligible for the incentive. Through this method, Chhattisgarh has paved the path for many more districts, both in terms of innovations around the incentive as well as to customise solutions for their own state. This Learning Paper documents the Community Incentive Method. It focuses on how and why it evolved, how it works, the challenges of using a similar approach and recommendations.