Indian bureaucracy is famous. It is ancient, large and populist. It forces one to negotiate or perish. This could have been the fate of CLTS also. A new and exciting idea, CLTS was born out of a humble engagement in a nondescript village of Bangladesh. CLTS kicked up a storm around the world for its impetus on collective behaviour change and opposition to household sanitation subsidy.
In India, improvement in sanitation has been the government agenda since Independence. However, its long preference to doling out subsidies, complex government mechanism and top-down programme implementation meant limited success repeatedly. Admittedly, CLTS could not have had it easy.
In the link that follows, Sri Deepak Sanan IAS (Retd.) traces the genesis and development of CLTS and how it changed the face of rural sanitation in Himachal Pradesh.