Fake data, inept toilets: Why use, construction don't match in rural India

More Indians living in villages owned a latrine in 2018 than four years ago, yet 44% of them still defecate in the open, according to a survey covering Rajasthan, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh that was released on January 4, 2019. These four states together contain two-fifths of India's rural population and reported high open defecation rates, over 68% in 2016, as per this government report.
Almost a quarter (23%) of those who own a latrine defecated in the open, a figure that has remained unchanged since 2014, researchers found. This can mostly be attributed to deeply entrenched beliefs about caste “impurity” associated with emptying latrine pits, the paper concluded.
“Changes in open defecation in rural north India: 2014 – 2018”, a working paper published by the research and policy advocacy Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE) and New Delhi-based policy think tank Accountability Initiative (AI), is based on surveys of over 9,812 people and 156 government officials in 2018.
The researchers first visited these participants in October 2014, a few months before the launch of India’s national sanitation programme Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) or Clean India Mission. In August 2018, they revisited them to gauge the impact of the mission. Observations from AI's 2017 survey in Udaipur, Rajasthan were also added to the survey. Read More



Business Standard