A departmental working paper by the World Bank on the progress of the Swacch Bharat Mission - Gramin (SBM-G) has now found that despite “breathtaking” gains made by the programme to bring toilet access to rural India since 2014-15, when it began, there has been a clear trend of regular toilet use declining in rural India from 2018-19 onwards, with the largest drop being seen among Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe socio-economic groups.
These findings come amid concerns over the government’s claims that practices such as open defecation and manual scavenging no longer continue in India solely based on the fact that toilet access had improved after the building of over 100 million toilets.
The paper, by researchers at the World Bank and a faculty of Economics at Yale University, reconciles varied data points on toilet access and usage from the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS), National Sample Surveys (NSS) and the National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) and the SBM-G’s own information system. The NARSS was conducted across rural India from 2017-18 to 2019-20 by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation with World Bank support.
The paper found that as the programme started, it led to a substantial increase in access to own or shared improved toilets in rural India - from 38% in 2012 to 90% in 2019-20 - with the sharpest increase reported in the last two years of this time period.
The researchers noted that while the SBM information system documented access to shared or own toilets, it had no way of measuring toilet usage. However, data from the surveys pointed out that there was a parallel rise in toilet usage with the above-mentioned increase in toilet access.
But while noting that this analysis was for the absolute increase from 2014-15 to 2019-21, the paper also said that the annual improvements in regular toilet use had not been linear “and masks two distinct phases evident in the data”.
Negative trends
“The first phase of 2015-2019 was marked by large improvements, followed by some stagnation and decline over the last two years. The recent negative trends are most concerning and raises questions about sustainability,” the paper said.
It added that the States where there has been a sustained decline in regular use of toilets since 2018 were Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Karnataka, and Himachal Pradesh, whereas seven other States like Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and West Bengal have been seeing an uneven decline in toilet use since 2018.
Seven other States - Odisha, Punjab, Kerala, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Haryana, and Assam - were found to be steady performers in terms of continued toilet usage. “Therefore, even when using the broadest definition of toilet use - i.e., regular use of any toilet - the analysis confirms that toilet use is not being sustained in rural households in most Indian states,” the paper said.
“At the national level, regular use of any toilet (improved or unimproved) increased from 46% to 75% on average in rural areas during 2015-16 and 2019-21. This increase was across all population and socio-economic sub-groups we track, and especially pronounced for the poor and socially disadvantaged groups,” the paper noted.
But even as the regular use of any toilet for SC and ST people saw a jump of 51 and 58 percentage points respectively between 2015-16 and 2018-19 - reaching almost the same levels as those in the General Category, the paper said these gains were reversing since then.
Decline amongst SCs, STs
“While regular use of toilets declined for all groups, the decline is the largest for the SCs and the STs. There was a 20 percentage point decline in regular use of toilets for the SCs and a 24 percentage point decline for the STs compared to a decline of 9 and 5 percentage points for the Other Backward Caste and General categories,” the paper said.
The paper noted that a large increase in toilet use was seen in the poorest 20% of the rural population, which reported toilet use going up from 7% to 43% in between 2015-16 and 2019-21. It added that similar large increases were reported in all quintiles save for the richest 20%.
The paper also said that these national trends hid a wide spatial variation in toilet use across and within States. It concluded that most low-income States were among the best performers in terms of their overall increase in regular use of toilets and that the performance of richer States was mixed.
Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh – all low performers at the beginning of SBM-G - saw absolute increases of 52, 45, 43 and 41 percentage points respectively in the six-year period from 2015-16 to 2019-21, it reported, also pointing out that states like Odisha, Bihar, Rajasthan saw smaller gains.
Similarly, while regular toilet use has increased in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Gujarat, the amount of progress was found to be smaller than poorer States.
