The first is the verification system for the national award or NGP model, and the second is the state sanitation award model. This note explains the process followed (preverification, during verification and post-verification), results achieved, and lessons learnt.

Over the last few years, the concept of open-defecation free (ODF) communities has emerged as one of the building blocks toward achieving total sanitation.This has led policy makers and practitioners to adopt strategies that achieve community-wide total sanitation status, which includes the community becoming ODF, and adopting safe hygiene and environmental sanitation practices.

The acceptance of the concept of ODF underlines two significant shifts in the approach to rural sanitation. First, it moves away from ‘counting toilets constructed’ to ‘counting the number of communities that have become ODF’. Second, this signals a shift from individual household toilet construction to community-level behavior change to end open defecation as the objective of a sanitation program.

In India, the concept of ODF communities, as an objective, has been a part of the guidelines of the national rural sanitation program, the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), since 1999. However, a major thrust was received with the introduction of national-level reward programs such as the Nirmal Gram Puraskar (NGP) and state-level reward programs by a few states such as Maharashtra (Sant Gadge Baba Gram Swachata Abhiyan [SGBGSA]) and Tamil Nadu (Clean Village Campaign).

The NGP is a one-time reward exclusively focused on motivating rural sanitation achievement. It is given to a local government once it has achieved ODF status and addressed environmental sanitation in all the areas under its jurisdiction. The state-level sanitation incentive programs are annual competitions in which the GPs compete against each other to be recognized as the ‘best’ on various development parameters, including sanitation, at different administrative levels – block, district, division and, ultimately, state.

A robust verification system is a prerequisite for an effective incentive program to motivate achievement of ODF status by local governments. The experience gained from the verification system instituted for the national and state reward programs in India has some important lessons, not just for the Indian context but also in terms of replication potential. These include:

• A need to plan for scale
• The verification process should be of a quality that inspires confidence among participants. It should adopt transparent and objective rules and conditions, and teams must be capacitated to undertake quality verification.
• As communities achieving ODF status scale up, the verification and incentive system needs to be decentralized to ensure that quality is maintained.
• A multilevel verification process and the presence of multistakeholder teams help to facilitate objectivity of the verification process and adherence to the basic principles

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