Every morning around dawn, dozens of people gather by the dusty banks of a stream snaking through Shikrawa village, two hours south of Delhi, to defecate in the open.

“There are close to 1,600 houses in Shikrawa. And I know for a fact that some 400 of those don’t have toilets,” said Khurshid Ahmed, a village council official in Shikrawa, Haryana.

Govt records

According to government records, Haryana – with its population of more than 2.5 crore – is squeaky clean. The State, along with most others in India, is classified ‘open defecation-free’, while a World Bank-supported nationwide survey says only 0.3 per cent of Haryana’s rural population defecates outside.

But interviews with over half a dozen surveyors involved in the World Bank-supported study, and two participating researchers, all raised significant concerns with the methodology of the survey, and its findings. India’s sanitation programme had “succeeded in lifting more than 550 million people out of open defecation in a short period of less than five years,” the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation said in a release on Friday in response to a Reuters’ article.

Ground reality

In Shikrawa, interviews with 27 people showed at least 330 villagers still defecate in the open because of a lack of toilets, issues with accessing water, or simply a dogged opposition to changing old habits. An hour away in the village of Nangla Kanpur, things aren’t any different.

The ministry said it “is difficult to comment on isolated incidents of non-usage,” but it believes that households may try to hide that they have a toilet, in the expectation of receiving further financial incentives to build toilets. Studies link open defecation to public health issues, as it increases the spread of parasites due to water contamination. The World Bank said in 2016 that one in every 10 deaths in India is linked to poor sanitation.

In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the ‘Swachh Bharat’ campaign and vowed to eliminate open defecation nationwide in five years. Modi has often used the success of Swachh Bharat in election campaigning. “We got more than 10 crore toilets built,” he said at a rally on Sunday.

Swachh Bharat, a multi-billion-dollar programme backed by money from the government and a World Bank loan, has indeed built millions of latrines, but critics say official statistics paint an overly optimistic picture of its success.

“The whole point of this is for people's health,” said Payal Hathi, a researcher consulted on the World Bank-backed survey. “It’s unfortunate that the data is so misleading.”

Data from the World Bank-supported National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) that concluded in February shows that only about 10 per cent of rural Indians defecate in the open. The survey was conducted using funds from a $1.5 billion World Bank loan for Swachh Bharat. A separate study conducted over a similar timeline by the non-profit Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (RICE), where Hathi was a researcher, shows 44 per cent of the rural population across four large States still defecate in the open.

Hathi and fellow researcher Nikhil Srivastav also say they witnessed several lapses at meetings held to design the survey.

The specific goal of reporting low open-defecation levels was communicated clearly by government representatives to Kantar Public, the company contracted to conduct the survey and by Kantar to the surveyors, the two said. Kantar, owned by advertising giant WPP, did not respond to requests for comment.

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