Water,
Sanitation
& Hygiene 101

Diarrhoea, worm infections and many enteric infections travel the same way, from one person's faeces to another person's mouth. Each service blocks a different stretch of that route. A toilet keeps faeces out of the environment, safe water keeps them out of the drink, and soap keeps them off the hands that prepare food and feed children.

Handwashing with soap after defecation, after cleaning a child and before food. Covered storage and household treatment. The NSS 76th round found 65.3% of households did not treat drinking water, 72.8% in rural areas (NSS Report No. 584, 76th round (July-December 2018), NSO, 2019, Statement 8).

In 2018, 58.2% of rural households and 80.7% of urban households had drinking water within their premises (NSS Report No. 584, 76th round (July-December 2018), NSO, 2019). Someone in the other households walks to fetch it, and that person is usually a woman or a girl. In the JJM Functionality Assessment 2022, 79% of households where women used to fetch water reported less drudgery after a tap was installed (JJM Functionality Assessment 2022, national report).

Read a JMP ladder and explain each rung. Reconcile a government ODF claim with NSS, NFHS and independent survey figures. Read a JJM dashboard number alongside the functionality assessment. Look up your block's groundwater category and contamination record. Explain the 2013 Act on manual scavenging and what NAMASTE does. Design a monitoring plan that measures use and function as well as construction.

These are sources that by design can deliver safe water, such as piped water, boreholes and tubewells, protected dug wells and springs, rainwater and packaged or delivered water. The NFHS-6 footnote lists piped water, public taps, tubewells, protected wells and springs, rainwater, tanker trucks, carts with small tanks, bottled water and community RO plants (NFHS-6 India fact sheet (provisional), IIPS, May 2026).

Behaviour is hard to observe in a survey visit, so enumerators ask to see the place where household members usually wash hands and record whether water and soap are there. A facility makes handwashing possible. It does not show that anyone washes at the moments that matter.

For safely managed drinking water the JMP takes the lowest of three proportions among people using improved sources, which are accessible on premises, available when needed and free from contamination. It reports the estimate only if quality data cover at least half the population and accessibility or availability data are also present (WHO/UNICEF JMP country file, India, updated August 2025, Charts SM notes).

Among Indians using improved sources in 2024, the JMP estimates 91.3% have water free from contamination, 84.5% have it available when needed and 76.4% have it on premises (WHO/UNICEF JMP country file, India, updated August 2025). On-premises access is the lowest, so it sets the safely managed figure.

Sanitation is mostly on-site, with pits and septic tanks serving 87.5% of rural people. Water quality is the weaker link. Among rural people using improved sources, 11.9% do not have water free from contamination (WHO/UNICEF JMP country file, India, updated August 2025).

Improved drinking water reached 99.1% urban and 95.4% rural. Diarrhoea prevalence among under-fives was 6.7% urban and 8.3% rural, up from a national 7.3% in NFHS-5 (NFHS-6 India fact sheet (provisional), IIPS, May 2026).

NSS rounds, including the 76th round of 2018 and the 2020-21 round, and the 2023 HCES and CAMS surveys, carry household latrine questions, and the JMP lists them as inputs. The ImpactMojo Deep Dive What NFHS-6 stopped counting collects the readings on this gap.

An incentive of ₹12,000 is paid for building an individual household latrine to BPL households and to identified APL households, namely SC and ST households, small and marginal farmers, landless labourers with homestead, persons with disabilities and women-headed households. States may add to it from their own share (DDWS Year End Review 2025, PIB).

Every figure on this slide is what states report on the SBM(G) management information system (IMIS). A latrine is entered when it is built. The record says nothing about whether the household uses it five years later, whether the pit has filled, or whether the structure still stands.

SBM-U launched on 2 October 2014. The ODF protocol came in 2016, ODF+ and ODF++ protocols in 2018, the Water+ protocol in 2019, and SBM-U 2.0 in October 2021 (SBM-Urban 2.0 portal, sbmurban.org, read October 2026).

It reports declarations by villages and a coverage figure from the programme's own records. Coverage here means households recorded as having a toilet. It is an access measure, the first of the four measurements in Section 1.

A transparent public discussion of the mission's costs, benefits and results based on evidence, as their abstract puts it (Gupta et al., IZA Discussion Paper 12065, 2019).

Every source used in this course shows a large fall in open defecation after 2014. The r.i.c.e. panel shows a 26-point fall in four years in the states where open defecation was most common, and 57% of its households that had no latrine in 2014 had one by 2018 (Down To Earth report). The JMP rural line falls by about 34 points from 2014 to 2024. It also fell by about 34 points from 2004 to 2014, so the fitted trend shows no break at 2014, which is a reason to read the survey points directly.

A declaration is binary for a whole village. A survey measures a share of people. A village where 90% of people use toilets is not ODF by definition, yet a declaration can still be filed for it.

Households were first asked which government benefits they had received. A household that had just said it received toilet support may then report having a toilet, whether or not it uses one or whether it was completed. The statistical office printed that caveat beside its headline number.

Among households with access to a latrine, 94.7% of rural males and 95.7% of rural females used it regularly, and 3.5% of rural household members never used it. In urban areas 98.0% of males and 98.1% of females used it regularly (NSS Report No. 584, 76th round (July-December 2018), NSO, 2019, Statements 15-16).

Promote twin pits with the fact that a rested pit holds decomposed material (NSS defines a rest period of one and a half years), make mechanised emptying available and visible, and never assign emptying to caste-identified workers.

Adequate quantity means at least 55 litres per capita per day. Prescribed quality means the BIS:10500 drinking water standard, which JJM adopted for tap water service delivery (Ministry of Jal Shakti, PIB, 10 March 2025).

The JJM management information system records a connection when the pipe and tap are installed and the household is listed. Villages then move to Har Ghar Jal reported and, later, certified status on the dashboard. Neither step measures how many litres arrive or whether they are safe.

Four in five households said the tap met their daily needs. Of the 26% without daily supply, 4% received water five or six days a week, 14% three or four days and 8% once a week. More than half (57%) purified water before drinking, and no more than 3% used RO. Only 35% paid any service charge (JJM Functionality Assessment 2022, national report).

2,863 water testing laboratories, of which 1,682 are NABL-accredited. Over 51 lakh samples tested in labs in 2025-26 up to 29 December 2025, and over 37 lakh samples tested with field test kits by trained village women in the same period (DDWS Year End Review 2025, PIB).

The Central Ground Water Board (CGWB) and state governments assess dynamic groundwater resources every year. The stage of extraction is annual extraction for irrigation, industry and domestic use divided by the extractable resource (Ministry of Jal Shakti, PIB, 18 December 2025).

NITI Aayog's Composite Water Management Index (August 2019) reported that groundwater accounts for 62% of irrigation water and is declining in 52% of cases, and named energy subsidies that promote over-extraction and poor matching of crops to agro-climatic zones among the causes.

The Annual Groundwater Quality Report 2024 was based on sampling at 15,259 monitoring locations. In Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Jammu and Kashmir all samples met BIS standards. Rajasthan, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh showed contamination in isolated pockets (Ministry of Jal Shakti, PIB, 10 March 2025).

NAQUIM has mapped about 25 lakh sq km of the country's aquifers and district aquifer maps and management plans have been shared for 654 districts. The CGWB Master Plan for Artificial Recharge 2020 outlines about 1.42 crore structures with a potential of about 185 BCM (Ministry of Jal Shakti, PIB, 18 December 2025).

State public health engineering departments and water supply and sewerage boards build and often run schemes. States choose technologies, set tariffs, appoint staff and decide how far to devolve functions to panchayats and municipalities.

The 73rd Amendment came into force on 24 April 1993. It gave panchayats constitutional status and provided for devolving the 29 subjects listed in the Eleventh Schedule, along with State Finance Commissions and regular elections. The word that matters is may, because each state decides what to devolve.

Sewage and septage dumped without treatment contaminate the sources that drinking water schemes draw on. The SBM-U ODF++ and Water+ certifications are attempts to make cities treat what they collect, a duty the 1974 Act already implied for discharges.

SBM(G) shares costs 60:40 with most states, 90:10 with the north-eastern and Himalayan states and Jammu and Kashmir, and pays fully in UTs (DDWS Year End Review 2025, PIB). Under JJM, Uttar Pradesh had been allocated ₹60,816 crore as central share from 2019 to December 2025, and states may use up to 2% of their allocation for water quality monitoring and surveillance (PIB, 4 December 2025).

A national JJM helpline and local grievance channels, monthly joint inspections of four schemes per state since April 2025, review meetings with district collectors (729 DMs and DCs took part in Jal Jeevan Samvad in 2025), and a District Collectors' Peyjal Samvad first held on 14 October 2025 (DDWS Year End Review 2025, PIB).

Septic tanks built without a soak pit or with an outlet to a drain discharge effluent directly. Single pits must be emptied while the contents are fresh. Where desludging trucks are private and unregistered, nothing records where they unload. The JMP country file records no sludge for India as emptied and treated, and treated wastewater at 5.9% of the population.

The SBM-U 2.0 portal lists 984 sewage treatment plants of 5 MLD or more and 969 faecal sludge treatment plants of 5 KLD or more. It also lists 3,158 cities declared Safaimitra Surakshit Shehar (SBM-Urban 2.0 portal, sbmurban.org, read October 2026).

The 58,098 figure is the number of eligible manual scavengers identified in the two national surveys. It is a count of people the surveys found and accepted. People the surveys missed are not in it, so treat it as a floor.

Curtis and Cairncross pooled intervention and observational studies and estimated that washing hands with soap could reduce the risk of diarrhoeal disease by 42-47%. They warned that many studies were of poor quality and that publication bias could inflate the figure (Lancet Infectious Diseases, 2003).

In Odisha latrine coverage reached 63% of households. If health gains require most of a community to stop open defecation, 63% may be below the threshold. The authors concluded that the expected health outcome cannot be assumed from coverage (Clasen et al., 2014).

The JMP framework covers use of menstrual materials, enough materials, a private place to wash and change, awareness before the first period, ability to reduce pain, comfort seeking help and participation in school, work and social activities. India has no national estimate on any of these in the JMP file (WHO/UNICEF JMP country file, India, updated August 2025).

The NSS 76th round found 87.6% of rural and 90.9% of urban households had sufficient drinking water from their principal source throughout the year (NSS Report No. 584, 76th round (July-December 2018), NSO, 2019). The 2022 JJM assessment found 43% of households with a tap had faced a shortage in piped supply at some time. In Ladakh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Odisha and Meghalaya almost six in ten households reported shortages, and the report found seasonal scarcity was being managed by households with limited community action (JJM Functionality Assessment 2022, national report).

The Composite Water Management Index reported that about 74% of the area under wheat and 65% of the area under rice faces significant water scarcity, that groundwater accounts for 62% of irrigation water, and that best estimates indicate demand will exceed supply by a factor of two by 2030 (NITI Aayog, CWMI, August 2019).

Pits and septic tanks that flood can release excreta into the lanes and into shallow wells nearby. Raised plinths, sealed tanks and planned emptying before the monsoon reduce the risk. DDWS's 2025 toilet repair campaign included awareness on its Climate Resilient Sanitation and Service Delivery Protocol (DDWS note on SBM(G) Phase II, January 2026).

Use the MIS to find where things were built, a statistical survey to find how many people use them, and a small independent check to understand why.

Cheap and fast. Inflated for socially approved behaviour such as handwashing and toilet use. Ask about the last occasion, since usual practice invites the approved answer. Ask each person separately, and put programme-benefit questions at the end, as the NSS's own warning suggests.

Village women trained to use field test kits tested over 37 lakh samples in 2025-26 up to 29 December 2025 (DDWS Year End Review 2025, PIB). Kits screen for common problems and should trigger a lab test when they show a problem.