This is with reference to an article published in the Mint on 19thDecember 2018 titled “India’s toilet stats raise a stink” which questions the administrative date on SBM by citing the recently released report on the 76thround of the NSS. This, in spite of the fact that the NSS report itself unequivocally mentions that its results on sanitation and LPG coverage are likely to be significantly under-reported due to large scale respondent bias.
The author of the article had also reached out to the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation(DDWS) prior to publishing it, seeking clarifications on respondent bias, processes followed by the enumerators, and claims of other smaller surveys by certain entities with vested interests. It is rather unfortunate that the author has chosen to disregard the Department’s clear explanations on all of these topics, and portray them as supporting arguments for her flimsy hypothesis.
The articleattempts to question the commentary on respondent bias of NSS itself, by quoting a former Chief Statistician of India as saying that the extent of bias “depends much on how the respondent is reading the purpose of the survey”. This actually strengthens the argument of respondent bias as put forth by NSS, as the respondents were asked a leading question on “benefits received from the government” for these facilities prior to asking whether the households had access to these facilities, as clarified by the NSS in the report and reiterated by the DDWS in its response to the author. This makes it clear thatthe respondents were likely to perceive the purpose of the survey to be an assessment of the receipt of government benefits for sanitation and other facilities.
After confirming with the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI), DDWS has also clarified to the author that the enumerators are not required to physically verify the presence of toilets/LPG or any other facility. Yet, the author says that the respondents would not “conceal information on a large benefit like a toilet, especially since it can be physically verified”. Further, the author seems unaware that in many parts of the country, toilets are at a distance from the house,making it even more difficult for the enumerators to verify its presence. This further displays the author’s lack of understanding of the sanitation context in rural India.
The article also cites surveys by the biased R.I.C.E to support the hypothesis. The DDWS has previously, on multiple occasions, requested the media to exercise caution in publishing biased and non-representative studies with poor methodologies. R.I.C.E. in particular, has been one of those perennial critics who,while having no positive suggestions to offer, have continually attempted to raise false doubts about the sanitation status in the country, based on incorrect, non-representative, and often non-existent data gathered from dubious statistical methods. Further, the survey methods of the National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS), which happens to be the most procedurally robust large scale sanitation survey in India, supervised by an Expert Working Group comprising the World Bank, UNICEF, Water Aid, Niti Aayog etc, and chaired by stalwarts like Prof Amitabh Kundu and Dr. N.C. Saxena.
And lastly, the article questions the usage of toilets in rural India by citing an IDInsight study. Again, this seems to support the NARSS findings of 95% toilet usage as it says that one person in a quarter of households with access to toilets defecate in the open in Darbhanga district, Bihar. A simple calculation for average five membered households will show that this amounts to only one in 20 people who have access to a toilet but don’t use it, meaning usage of 95%.
TheDDWS would like to categorically state that this article has presented an incorrect and misleading analysis of the report of the 76thround of the NSS.
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RCJ/PK