KOPPAL/SHIKRAWA: Every morning around dawn, dozens of people gather by the dusty banks of a stream snaking through Shikrawa village, two hours south of India’s capital, New Delhi, to do the same thing: defecate in the open.
“There are close to 1,600 houses in Shikrawa. And I know for a fact that some 400 of those don’t have toilets,” said Khurshid Ahmed, a village council official in Shikrawa, which is located in the northern state of Haryana.
Federal government records say Haryana – with its population of more than 25 million – is squeaky clean. The state, along with most others in India is classified “open defecation-free”, while a World Bank-supported nationwide survey says only 0.3% of Haryana’s rural population defecates outside.
But interviews with over half a dozen surveyors involved in the World Bank-supported study, and two participating researchers, all raised significant concerns with the methodology of the survey, and its findings.
In Shikrawa, interviews with 27 people showed at least 330 villagers still defecate in the open because of a lack of toilets, issues with accessing water, or simply a dogged opposition to changing old habits. An hour away in the village of Nangla Kanpur, things aren’t any different.
Studies link open defecation to public health issues, as it increases the spread of parasites due to water contamination. The World Bank said in 2016 one in every ten deaths in India is linked to poor sanitation.
In a country plagued by sexual assault crimes, the lack of toilets also disproportionately affects women, who have to walk long distances before dawn or after dark to relieve themselves.
In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the “Swachh Bharat,” or “Clean India” campaign and vowed to eliminate open defecation nationwide in five years.
Modi, who is seeking re-election for a second term in polls that conclude on Sunday, has often used the success of Swachh Bharat in campaigning. “We got more than 100 million toilets built,” he said at a rally in north India on Sunday.
Swachh Bharat, a multi-billion-dollar program backed by money from the government and a World Bank loan, has indeed built millions of latrines, but critics say official statistics paint an overly optimistic picture of its success.
“The whole point of this is for people’s health,” said Payal Hathi, a researcher consulted on the World Bank-backed survey. “It’s unfortunate that the data is so misleading.”
Data from the World Bank-supported National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) that concluded in February shows that only about 10% of rural Indians defecate in the open. The survey was conducted using funds from a $1.5 billion World Bank loan for Swachh Bharat.
A separate study conducted over a similar timeline by the non-profit Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE), where Hathi was a researcher, shows 44% of the rural population across four large states still defecate in the open.