r.i.c.e.

Now, I don't really like to talk too much about toilets because it takes away from the conversation on latrine use, but Aashish and I just did some math on missing toilets, and the statistics are pretty stark.

For the past 15 years, the Total Sanitation Campaign, and then the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA), has been building latrines across rural India, but despite these efforts, there has been little reduction in open defecation. In fact, from 2001 to 2011, latrine coverage in rural India increased by about 1 percentage point each year. A total of 5.2 crore rural households, or 31 percent of rural families, had toilets by 2011 in total. The website for the NBA, however, states that it built 8.7 crore toilets between 2001 and 2011

The government’s claims are even more startling when you consider that the Census showed that only about 80 lakh new toilets were built in rural areas over the same period. Let’s make the incorrect assumption that the government was responsible for all of these new toilets. For every toilet that was actually constructed, the government spent money to build 10!

So how many more missing toilets will there be on 31st August, the end of the PMs first 100 days, and the deadline for the construction of 5.2 million toilets? Wouldn't it be a much better use of funds to instead focus on promoting latrine use, instead of building phantom toilets?