International Journal of Gender & Women's Studies

Assessment of Swachh Bharat Mission - Clean India Campaign’s Contribution in Combating Violence against Women
Shweta Khandelwal, Priyanka Tamboli, Suman Madhup, Giribabu Dandabathula

Abstract
In this article, we present the results after assessing the Indian’s Swachh Bharat Mission’s (SBM) (aka Clean India Campaign) contribution in combating violence against women and girls while attending nature’s call. Towards this, firstly we have used the publicly available data from National Crimes Records Bureau (NCRB - India) to identify the hotspot districts with highest crimes against women in the country. Various districts in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, and Assam were top in the list of hotspots for gender based crimes; these districts were prioritized for investigation in this study. Context-driven web crawlers were developed and used to retrieve the reported crimes against women and girls from the district editions of electronic newspapers from 2010 till 2018. The results obtained from this web crawler were analyzed to determine the trend of gender-based sexual assaults before and after SBM implementation. It is observed that post SBM implementation, sexual assaults were reduced and the declining trend of crimes exhibited similar pattern for all the districts in the three states. The first dip in the trend has occurred during 2016 and consequently, there is reduction of crimes against women from 2017 onwards. The availability of sanitation infrastructure in the form of Independent Household Latrines under SBM’s program should have influenced the reduction of practicing the open defecation to a certain extent, and the reduction in open defecation practice has helped in reducing the scope of sexual encounters during the course of routine sanitation needs. It is observed that in 2016, sexual assaults have downsized to 65 per cent and by the year 2018 the percentage dip in reduction of violence against women is more than 90 per cent.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijgws.v8n2a13