Cheering for toilets but with caution

Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation (MoDWS) commissioned two private consultancies, IPE Global and Kantar, to conduct a nationwide survey to verify India's ODF status

This is big. No doubt about it. In the past four years, India has built 100 million toilets in its 600,000 villages and another 6.3 million in its cities. The country has been declared open defecation free (ODF) — a seemingly impossible task just some years ago. According to government estimates, by 2019, over 93 per cent of the country’s households had access to toilets; in over 93 per cent of the villages, people do not defecate in the open; over 96 per cent who had access also used the toilets, suggesting an important change in behaviour. Then 99 per