India Has Built More Than 12 Crore Household Toilets Under the Swachh Bharat Mission Since 2014, and 4.89 Lakh Villages Had Been Declared ODF Plus (Model) by December 2025

The Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation reports that states had built more than 12 crore household toilets and 2.67 lakh community sanitary complexes under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Grameen) between 2 October 2014 and 16 December 2025. On that date 4,89,526 villages had been declared ODF Plus (Model), the mission’s target grade for a village that stays free of open defecation and also manages its solid and liquid waste.

Everything below is dated and tied to a named report. Where a figure comes from the government’s own reporting system rather than an outside survey, the text says so.

How the mission began and what came before it

According to the department’s 2026 note, the Prime Minister launched the mission on 2 October 2014, with the aim of making India open defecation free (ODF) by 2 October 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. It is a centrally sponsored scheme, a category that an article on how money flows from Delhi to the states explains.

A Ministry of Jal Shakti factsheet of 16 November 2021 puts rural sanitation coverage at 39 percent in 2014 and says about 55 crore rural people had no toilet. Three earlier programmes preceded the mission, the factsheet says: the Central Rural Sanitation Programme (1986), the Total Sanitation Campaign (1999) and Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (2012). Their gap, in the factsheet’s words, was a strong behaviour-change approach.

Households got Rs 12,000 per toilet, and the factsheet says the government allocated more than Rs 1.3 lakh crore over the five years of the first phase. Every toilet was geotagged on a monitoring portal, the Integrated Management Information System.

The 2 October 2019 declaration

On 2 October 2019, at the Sabarmati Riverfront in Ahmedabad, the Prime Minister addressed about 20,000 sarpanches (village heads) and Swachhagrahis (village volunteers) and dedicated a Swachh Bharat to the people of India and to Gandhi. A Press Information Bureau (PIB) release of 3 October 2019 gave rural sanitation coverage as 39 percent in October 2014 and 100 percent in September 2019. By their own declaration, the release said, 35 states and union territories, 699 districts and 599,963 villages were free of open defecation.

Later documents shift the count a little. The 2021 factsheet gives 10.28 crore toilets built and 603,175 villages declared ODF in five years, and a later PIB review says all villages, and so all 36 states and union territories, had declared by October 2019.

By 12 January 2026 states reported more than 12 crore household toilets and 2.68 lakh community sanitary complexes. For 2014-15 to 2024-25, the year-end review’s expenditure table lists Rs 93,723.40 crore as the central share of funds utilised.

ODF Plus: from building toilets to managing waste

Phase II began on 1 April 2020 with an outlay of over Rs 1.40 lakh crore. Keeping villages ODF, solid waste management, liquid waste management and visible cleanliness make up its four parts. PIB’s 2022 explainer describes an ODF Plus village as one that sustains its ODF status and has systems for solid or liquid waste, and counted 114,098 such villages on 21 September 2022.

The department’s figures for the top grade, ODF Plus (Model), are far higher. On 16 December 2025 it listed 4,89,526 declared villages, 4,15,915 of them verified. By 12 January 2026 the count was over 4.93 lakh, or 84 percent of villages. More than 5.28 lakh villages (90 percent) reported solid waste arrangements and over 5.44 lakh (93 percent) liquid waste arrangements. Under its GOBARdhan scheme, the department also lists 977 functional community biogas plants, and 5,334 blocks (75 percent) with plastic waste arrangements, a field where India’s plastic rules set the producer duties.

An evaluation by NITI Aayog found, the note adds, 96 percent of villages had reached ODF Plus status by March 2025. That figure is not split by grade in the note. A campaign from 19 November to 10 December 2025, Hamara Shauchalay, Hamara Bhavishya, repaired or beautified more than 1 lakh household toilets and over 550 community complexes, the department says.

Three rounds of an outside survey

The ministry commissioned the National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) from an independent verification agency, under a World Bank support project. Round 1 ran from mid-November 2017 to mid-March 2018. PIB reported that 77 percent of households had access to a toilet and that 93.4 percent of those with access used it. Round 1 also confirmed ODF status in 95.6 percent of villages previously declared and verified as ODF.

Round 2 ran from November 2018 to February 2019. Access stood at 93.1 percent of households, against 96 percent in the mission’s own portal that November, and 96.5 percent of those with access used the toilet. Of previously verified villages, 90.7 percent were confirmed as ODF.

Round 3, by Kantar Public for the ministry, ran from November 2019 to February 2020 and drew on 91,934 households. The report puts access at 94.4 percent nationally, counting own, shared and public toilets: 98.0 percent in ODF villages and 77 percent in non-ODF villages. Household toilets were functional in 96.4 percent of cases, and 89.9 percent of people with access were reported as always using the toilet. Across the three rounds, the share of the rural population using safe, functional and hygienic toilets rose from 62.3 to 82.7 to 85.0 percent. The mission’s studies page lists no later NARSS round.

Swachh Survekshan, the urban league table

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs runs Swachh Survekshan, a yearly ranking of cities. President Droupadi Murmu conferred the 2024-25 awards on 17 July 2025. PIB named Ahmedabad, Bhopal and Lucknow as the top Swachh Shehar, and Indore, Surat and Navi Mumbai as entrants to the Super Swachh League, a category introduced that year. The league admits cities that have placed in the top three at least once in the past three years and remain in the top 20 percent of their population category.

Twenty-three league cities were honoured and 43 national awards announced. Prayagraj received the Best Ganga Town award, and the Maha Kumbh administration a special recognition for waste management; the Ganga clean-up article covers the river itself. For the tenth edition, the ministry’s 2025-26 annual report says the toolkit has been released; the 2024-25 round is the latest with published results that tuput could open.

What the WHO and UNICEF data show

The WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) keeps the international series. The 2025 estimates, as published by Our World in Data, put the share of India’s population practising open defecation at 30.6 percent in 2015, 11.7 percent in 2022 and 6.7 percent in 2024. These are modelled estimates built from household surveys, and they measure open defecation, where NARSS measures household toilet access.

The programme’s 2023 update lists India among the countries whose coverage of at least basic sanitation rose by more than 20 percentage points between 2015 and 2022. In its year-end review, the department reads the JMP’s 2000 to 2024 report as showing that 676 million people in India moved away from open defecation over two decades.

What the health studies measured

In July 2018 the WHO’s India office presented a modelling study that the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation had requested. The WHO called the results initial estimates. The model projected that the mission would avert more than 300,000 deaths from diarrhoea and protein-energy malnutrition between 2014 and October 2019, and more than 14 million disability-adjusted life years, a measure of years lost to illness or early death. Unsafe sanitation caused an estimated 199 million diarrhoea cases a year before 2014, the WHO said. Universal use of safe sanitation by October 2019 was an assumption built into the projection. For the vaccine side of disease prevention, see the article on how Indian vaccines are made.

Two peer-reviewed studies looked at what happened afterwards. Parvati Singh, Manisha Shah and Tim Bruckner compared nearly all of India’s 640 districts before (2013-14) and after (2015-16) the mission began. In the Journal of Nutrition in 2021 they reported that under-five stunting fell by 0.06 percent for every percentage-point rise in households with toilets, with larger falls in rural areas and in districts that already had more toilets. The authors call the link an association and say unmeasured confounding cannot be excluded.

Suman Chakrabarti and colleagues, in Scientific Reports in 2024, analysed 35 states and 640 districts for 2011 to 2020. Districts where more than 30 percent of households received a toilet under the mission were associated with an infant mortality rate 5.3 lower and an under-five rate 6.8 lower, per 1,000 live births. Toilets may have averted about 60,000 to 70,000 infant deaths a year, by the authors’ estimate, though they write that their findings cannot be read as causal.

Usage and verification, the open questions

A research team that included Aashish Gupta, Sangita Vyas, Dean Spears and Diane Coffey revisited rural households in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh in late 2018. In an IZA discussion paper of January 2019 they report open defecation falling from about 70 percent of people over age two in 2014 to about 44 percent in their preferred estimate, with other methods giving 40 to 50 percent, and household latrine ownership rising from 37 to 71 percent. About 23 percent of people who owned a latrine still defecated in the open, in 2014 and again in 2018, and many respondents reported attempts to coerce latrine construction, including by withholding or threatening to withhold government benefits. The authors call for “transparent, fact-based public dialogue about the SBM”.

Fielded from July to December 2018, the National Statistics Office’s 76th round found 71.3 percent of rural households with access to a latrine. Among households with access, 94.7 percent of males and 95.7 percent of females used it regularly. Its report adds that respondents may have been biased, because the question on government scheme benefits came before the question on latrine access. NARSS round 2, fielded from November 2018 to February 2019, reported 93.1 percent.

Phase II has been extended to the 2026-27 financial year, the department’s note says.