The construction of toilets under the Government of India’s Swachh Bharat Mission has helped prevent the death of about 60,000-70,000 children every year. In fact, a team including researchers from the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute assessed nationally representative surveys covering 35 states/union territories and more than 600 districts over 20 years. This fact has come to light.
According to PTI, the research published in the journal Scientific Reports looked at the increase in access to toilets built under the Swachh Bharat Mission and the mortality rate among children under the age of five from 2000 to 2020. On looking at the results, it was found that on an average, access to district-level toilets has reduced cases of child deaths.
The authors of the research said that historically, there has been an inverse relationship between access to toilets and child mortality in India. They further found that an increase in toilet coverage by 30 percent or more in a district substantially reduced infant and child mortality. “In absolute numbers, this calculation would equate to an estimated 60,000-70,000 infant deaths annually,” the authors wrote.
He said that new evidence of reduction in infant and child mortality following a comprehensive national sanitation program has pointed to the potentially transformative role of the Swachh Bharat Mission. The researchers said that the findings are consistent with evidence from global and South Asian contexts, in which several studies analyzing population-level data collected through surveys show that improved sanitation can potentially reduce child mortality by 5-30 percent. Apart from this, construction of toilets has also increased the safety of women.
Let us tell you that this national campaign, officially launched by the Government of India on October 2, 2014, aims to clean the streets, roads and infrastructure of the country. One of the objectives of the campaign is to eliminate the problem of open defecation in villages by providing access to toilets in all rural households. According to a statement by Union Minister Hardeep Puri, by July 2024, about 12 crore toilets have been built in rural and urban India in the last nine years.
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