November 19 is World Toilet Day. The monitoring of sanitation facilities globally remained a challenge to the country governments and International agencies. It is sometimes said that the cursory assessment reports (e.g. JMP-Joint Monitoring Programme) of the facts about the rural and urban sanitation scenario may lead to pressure on country governments to expedite the process of providing better and sustainable sanitation infrastructure to their population.
In a scenario where still 2.5 billion people around the world don’t have clean toilet facilities and 1.1 billion still defecate in open, how much the advocacy terms as human right approach and sanitation as economic investment will pave better future for commons.
The problem of the commons in India on sanitation is about the low cost sustainable sanitation technology options, access to quick and reliable information for infrastructure building and some sort of advisory and technical support. The monitoring process and getting reliable information from the developed infrastructure is another important aspect that need serious consideration in India.
There are a number of facts about the development of rural sanitation infrastructure in India and in this the National Family Health Survey (NFHS 2006 ) data found that 74 percent households had no toilet facilities and they use bushes or field for defection. This report further elaborates that of the total 26 percent available toilets, 13.5 percent households have toilets connected to septic tanks, 5.4 as pour flush toilets, 2.9 pit toilets with slab and 2.3 percent pit toilets without slab.
The updated Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) report 2012 finds that there are 67 percent people in rural India those still defecate in open and 33 percent have a mix of improved, shared and other types of toilet facilities.
The physical monitoring progress report (19 Nov 2012) of Government of India finds that 71 percent individual households in rural India have toilet facilities, while only 29 percent households now need to construct individual household toilets. While the census 2011 has a different set of data for rural India, which states that 31 percent households have toilets while 69 percent have no toilets .
The government of India’s National Sample Survey-NSS (2008-09) report mentions that 65 percent people in rural India practice open defecation while only 26 percent have improved toilets.
For the 11 Indian mountains states the government of India’s updated monitoring report (19 Nov 2012) finds 75 percent households with toilet facilities, which is slightly better to its national average of 71 percent. However, on other hand the census 2011 finds that best performing mountain states like Himachal Pradesh could still develop 67 percent individual household toilets and Uttarakhand 54 percent in rural areas, as they have reported figure of 100 and 84 percent respectively.
The dilemma is that as we go deeper in to the statistics of different agencies and departments, one will only get numerous facts and they mostly mislead the planning process.
By K N Vajpai, @knvajpai
Mr. Vajpai,
The only survey that appears to give significantly different figures is the government’s physical monitoring progress report. Maybe this is because it just measures sanitation systems constructed and not systems actually in use. If you compare those two sets of data, you could actually calculate slippage rates. One could argue that having data sets from different sources measuring different things (construction vs use) gives a better picture of the reality and is not misleading at all.
Thank you for your comments. On the construction vs. usage point, I would say that even the JMP (Joint Monitoring Programme) that uses data from NFHS (National Family Health Survey in India, which has health, family planning and HIV/AIDs as focus) uses its data for Water and Sanitation Purposes. For example out of 1028 questions in NFHS Schedule/ questionnaire in this exhaustive survey we have 3 questions about Sanitation (given below), and 7 questions about water.
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Sanitation Q-1: -What kind of toilet facility do members of your household usually use? [in this case let's take a case, if the interviewee has a toilet and there are 5 members, and 2 of them go for OD, the person will say they usually use a VIP. Still there is practice of OD in the village in such case and there are no further probing questions, as the interviewer knows that 'sanitation' facility is not their focus]
Sanitation Q-2: -Do you share this toilet facility with other households?[take example, the interviewee says YES, for that case where sometime they have guests in their house, so it will count that family itself. There is no further probing question]
Sanitation Q-3: How many households use this toilet facility? [No further probing questions]
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So, when we don’t have such a mechanism itself in Water and Sanitation sector to report the USAGE with full confidence /research/survey, comparing this data with ‘construction’ only will further give misleading figures. This I also highlighted about JMP in one of my articles that it has flaws and need to focus that exclusive surveys are carried out in countries like India for WASH facilities constructed/developed and in use. So, even in this case there is a mismatch of usage; Census 2011 says 69% people without toilets, NSS says 65% without toilets and updated JMP report says 67% without toilets, and these figures are about over 1.2 billion population of India.