NEW DELHI: Three years ago, on Gandhi Jayanti , Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched India’s biggest cleanliness movement – Swachh Bharat Mission. From giving states money to build toilets to incentives to private players to process municipal waste and make compost or generate electricity, the mission was planned as a programme to clean cities and villages and obliterate open defecation.As Swachh Bharat Mission celebrates its third anniversary on October 2 next week, ET takes stock of how far Indian cities have come in the clean-up act.Construction of toilets is the foundation of Swachh Bharat Mission. At the outset, the Modi government set an ambitious target of building 65.82 lakh individual household toilets and five lakh community and public toilet seats. As the mission has crossed the halfway mark in terms of time, the statistics are impressive. About 38.51 lakh individual and 2.2 lakh community toilets have been built. Many states have even surpassed the targets they had set for themselves to build toilets (see box). In comparison, the Congress-led UPA government had built three lakh toilets in 10 years between 2004 and 2014.BJP-ruled states have shown more enthusiasm than those ruled by other parties. Delhi, for one, has remained lukewarm to the cleanliness initiative. Over the past three years, only 47 individual toilets have been built. Community and public toilet seats show better progress as 16,968 seats have been installed and 6,164 are under construction.The Modi government had kick-started the initiative by providing Rs 4,000 as central assistance per toilet. Though the earlier prescription was that states would give 25% of Centre’s contribution, states have been enthusiastically contributing more. Uttar Pradesh contributes double the Centre’s share at Rs 8,000 and the maximum share is given by Puducherry at Rs 22,000.There is, however, no way to gauge how effective the toilet construction exercise has been in bringing about behavioural change. A recent ‘Halla bol, lungi khol’ exercise by Ranchi municipal corporation to shame people defecating in the open, found that many people caught by them had toilets at home. The ministry has now been emphasising on spending the funds earmarked under information, education and communication (IEC) head of Swachh Bharat Mission.The other major head is solid waste management. The aim is to have door-to-door collection of garbage in all 81,000 urban wards in India. So far, 41,000 wards have been covered. However, waste processing – into compost or energy – remains a bigger challenge of the programme. When Swachh Bharat Mission started, the waste processing had reached a level of 16%. Three years on, it is at 22%.Total estimated capacity of production of compost from municipal waste is 54 lakh tonnes, but so far installed capacity of compost generation is just 15 lakh. At present, there are 145 compost plants in operation and 200 are under construction.As per housing and urban affairs ministry’s estimates, the power generation capacity from solid waste is about 600 mw, but of this only 92 mw is being generated. About 150 waste-to-energy projects are under construction to make up for the remaining capacity. The government has taken steps to ensure that solid waste management picks up. The central assistance through viability gap funding has been increased from 20% to 35%, chemicals and fertilizers ministry has extended market development assistance of `1,500 for each tonne of compost sold and now retail selling of compost in the vicinity of production plant has been allowed (earlier it was to be sold only in bags).