The Swachh Bharat Mission – Gramin, India’s national rural sanitation program, was launched in 2014with the aim to change the sanitation behaviours of over 530 million people practising open defecationacross 706 districts in five years. The scale of the challenge was enormous, and the pace ofchange needed to be rapid. It involved not just the building of hundreds of millions of toilets butconvincing hundreds of millions of people to use them. The program was tasked with overcomingthe same challenges that had plagued previous sanitation efforts in India which had been unable tosufficiently change mind-sets, social norms, and cultural practices of both households and theadministrative structures (Hueso and Bell 2013). The challenge India faced is not unique: manyother countries still face an up-hill battle to move households away from practising open defecationand a reliance on unimproved sanitation facilitates towards the use of safely managed sanitation services.Many countries are off-target or even regressing; the poorest and most marginalised communitiesand households remain unreached, while expenditure for sanitation has been declining since 2015 (WaterAid 2021).