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.
