What can we learn about Swachh Bharat Mission from NFHS-5 factsheets?
Published in Ideas for India, 2021
Co-authored with Diane Coffey and Dean Spears.
Policy paper: The Swachh Bharat Mission was introduced by Government of India in 2014 to eliminate open defecation. Based on data from the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS)-5 factsheets, this article shows that the sanitation situation has broadly remained the same between NFHS-4 in 2014 and NFHS-5 in 2019. Under fairly strong assumptions based on early data, half of the rural population in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Rajasthan, continue to defecate in the open.