Weeks after the World Bank published a departmental working paper highlighting the “most concerning” trend of toilet usage declining in rural India since 2018 despite early gains of the Swachh Bharat Mission - Gramin, it has recalled this paper and two others, pending an “internal review”, while insisting that the papers had not gone through the required approvals internally before being published on the website.
The paper titled “Progress on Sanitation in Rural India: Reconciling Diverse Evidence”, was published in September this year. It concluded that despite “breathtaking” gains in increasing toilet access, toilet usage had been going down in rural India since 2018 - with the largest drop in usage reported among people of Scheduled Caste (20 percentage points) and Scheduled Tribe (24 percentage points) communities.
The Hindu had reported the conclusions of this paper on October 4, till which time it was available on the World Bank website as part of its Policy Research Working Papers series. The World Bank cited “technical and procedural issues” with internal clearance for taking down this and two other papers, even amid reports that it was under pressure from the Union government to withdraw the working papers.
