By Payal Seth
India was declared an open defecation free (ODF) country at the conclusion of Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) on October 2, 2019. This claim was backed by the statistics from the SBM programme, which reported that India had achieved universal coverage i.e. the proportion of people with access to toilets. However, the statistics from NFHS-5 factsheet, which captures the use of these sanitation facilities, convey that India is far from achieving the ODF status (bit.ly/2MYzFEB).
The conflicting evidence about India’s ODF claims from the two Government of India’s sources can be explained as follows: SBM informs us about the access, while NFHS-5 reports the fraction of households that usually use the toilets. The two surveys jointly conclude that access to toilets in India does not concomitantly…