Rigour, timeliness, and trade-offs in research: experience from India’s Swachh Bharat Mission

ABSTRACT

This article presents lessons learnt from the evolution and usage of rapid action learning methods developed to support the Swachh Bharat Mission – Gramin (the Clean India Mission – Rural) in India. The Mission, started in 2014, aimed to change the sanitation behaviours of over 530 million people across 706 districts in five years. Participatory, action-orientated research and learning methods were trialled with government implementers, development partners, and communities. It was found that these methods enabled both a greater understanding of impacts at the community level, horizontal learning across districts, and the capacity development of Mission implementers.

KEYWORDS:

• Rapid action learning
• sanitation
• India
• participation
• learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A guide for convening and facilitating rapid action learning workshops is available for others to use (Chambers, Mishra, and Myers 2018).

2 Two guidance documents have been produced (see Abraham et al. (2018) and Praxis et al. (2017b)).

3 Although more traditional scientific research since the emergence of COVID-19, including vaccine trials and RCTs, has hugely accelerated in speed, this has only been achieved with large investments, something which is not replicable to overcome the multiple barriers to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

4 Recognised method-specific limitations are presented in Section 4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Styrelsen för Internationellt Utvecklingssamarbete: [Grant Number 12616].

Notes on contributors

Jamie Myers

Jamie Myers is the Research and Learning Manager for the Sanitation Learning Hub and a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds. He works on a range of different learning and research activities that support sanitation and hygiene programming, specialising in using participatory methods and learning processes which engage with different policy makers, practitioners and communities.

Naomi Vernon

Naomi Vernon is the Programme and Communications manager at the Sanitation Learning Hub and has worked for over a decade developing participatory research and learning programmes to support the WASH sector. She is the editor of SLH publication series', and author of a number of outputs including Sustainable Sanitation for All.

Robert Chambers

Professor Robert Chambers has worked for over 50 years writing widely about participatory methodologies, poverty and research, knowledge and learning in development

All are based at the Institute of Development Studies and have been working closely together on participatory action-orientated research and learning activities in the sanitation and hygiene sector since 2014.