Context:

• The National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) 2017-18, conducted by an Independent Verification Agency (IVA) under the World Bank support project to the Swachh Bharat Mission Gramin (SBM-G), has found that 93.4% of the households in rural India who have access to a toilet use it.
• The NARSS also re-confirmed the Open Defecation Free (ODF) status of 95.6% of villages which were previously declared and verified as ODF by various districts/states. 
• The survey was conducted between mid-November 2017 and mid-March 2018 and covered 92040 households in 6136 villages across States and UTs of India.

The key findings of NARSS 2017-18 are as follows:

• 77% of households were found to have access to toilets during the survey period
• 93.4% of the people who had access to toilets used them
• 95.6% of villages which were previously declared and verified as ODF were confirmed to be ODF. The remaining 4.4% villages also had sanitation coverage of over 95%
• 70% of the villages surveyed found to have minimal litter and minimal stagnant water

About SBM:

• Since its launch in October 2014, the SBM, the world’s largest sanitation program, has changed the behaviour of hundreds of millions of people with respect to toilet access and usage.
• 300 million people have stopped defecating in the open since the SBM began, down from 550 million at the beginning of the programme to about 200 million today.
• Over 6.5 crore toilets have been built across rural India under the Mission.
• Over 3.38 lakh villages and 338 districts have been declared ODF, along with 9 ODF States and 3 Union Territories, namely Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Chandigarh, Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli.

Source:PIB