A toilet is a piece of infrastructure with unusually intimate consequences. Its usefulness depends on water, privacy, maintenance and the willingness of everyone in a household to use it. Those requirements explain both the ambition of Swachh Bharat’s construction drive and the difficulty of declaring its work finished.
Launched on 2 October 2014, the rural mission set a five-year deadline for eliminating open defecation. The government subsequently reported that more than 10 crore individual household toilets had been constructed and that all states and Union territories had declared themselves open-defecation-free by 2 October 2019. That is the administrative account of the campaign’s first phase. [1]
An accelerated campaign on an older foundation
Rural sanitation policy had a history before 2014. The Total Sanitation Campaign began in 1999; Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan followed in 2012. Swachh Bharat inherited the problem and earlier institutional experience while making sanitation a much more prominent national political priority. The construction effort depended on states, local administrations, village institutions and households as well as the Union government. [4]
The first-phase construction total is substantial. But toilets built, households with access, people regularly using a toilet, and villages certified ODF are not interchangeable measures. Each answers a different question.
The survey record
The National Sample Survey’s July–December 2018 fieldwork found that 71.3% of rural households had access to a latrine, compared with 96.2% in urban areas. Among people in households with access, the survey reported regular use of improved latrines by 93.8% of rural males and 94.6% of rural females. The latter percentages exclude people in households without access. [2]
These observations predate the October 2019 declaration. They cannot, by themselves, establish the position on that later date. Equally, the declaration cannot be substituted for the survey results as if both measured the same population in the same way.
A second source records progress using another definition. The Economic Survey, drawing on the National Family Health Survey, reports that the proportion of the population living in households using an improved sanitation facility rose from 48.5% in 2015–16 to 70.2% in 2019–21. That is a marked improvement, though neither survey period is a clean before-and-after boundary around the mission’s launch. [3]
The work after construction
The government’s description of the mission’s second phase places emphasis on sustaining ODF status and managing solid and liquid waste. That change of emphasis recognises an operational reality: sanitation requires continuing services after the building work is complete. [1]
The strongest record is of a large construction mobilisation accompanied by improvement in survey measures of sanitation. The remaining questions are local and practical: whether a toilet works, whether water is available, whether waste is safely managed, and whether a household continues to use it. A national campaign can finance and accelerate construction. Its benefit is realised each day that the facility remains usable.