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Inaugurated in 2014, India’s Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) intends to eradicate open defecation in urban and rural areas by 2019. In cities, the scheme ranks municipalities for achieving open defecation-free status and other measures of cleanliness. In 2017, Indore was first nationally recognized with the national Cleanest City award. In the weeks before the city was evaluated, it sponsored a number of activities that demolished housing and sanitation infrastructures, singled out the female body for humiliation, and forced residents to revert back to the very sanitation practices the city was allegedly trying to eradicate.

This paper traces the differing articulations of power at work between the extension and demolition of the city’s infrastructure. It focuses particularly on latrines, the metrics, and the urban vision to make Indore the Cleanest City, but also gives attention to the additional infrastructures connected to latrine …