Salvoes over open defecation

Many millions of toilets have been built in the past four years, but it still seems implausible that India has, in effect, become a completely different country overnight

Under the radar, a great debate broke out this month about what is arguably India’s most pressing problem. That the controversy has been sparked by a research paper is bizarre, but the oddities do not end there. Changes in open defecation in rural north India: 2014-2018 is published by the research groups Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE) and Accountability Initiative. The authors acknowledge that millions more Indians in villages in India own a latrine since 2014, but assert that 44 per cent of the rural populations in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh still defecate in the open.