Stragglers in Swachh Bharat

A report found that across rural Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, 23% of people who have a toilet continue to defecate in the open

As we wait for the dates of the Lok Sabha election to be announced, it’s increasingly becoming harder to separate fact from fiction; truth from exaggeration. Take the findings of the recently-out second edition of National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) 2018-19. It has found that 93.1 per cent of rural Indian households now have access to toilets — and 96.5 per cent of these are in constant use. My experiences in the field tell me otherwise: You can give a person a toilet, but getting him/her to use it is another matter. Which is why in the frenetic race