An official report has contradicted Indian government claims that rural areas of the country are completely free from the practice of open defecation.The National Statistical Office (NSO) has released data showing that more than a quarter of households surveyed in rural India last year didn’t have access to a toilet.About 71.3% of households in rural areas had access to toilets.The report is controversial as it follows an announcement last month by Prime Minister Narendra  Modi that 100% of India’s villages had declared themselves free of open defecation after a massive toilet-building programme by his government.

Mr Modi had a long-held ambition of achieving this target by 2 October this year, the 150th anniversary of the birthday of India’s independence figure, Mahatma Gandhi.Rural India, its villages have now declared themselves open-defecation free.The NSO report is based on a survey carried out between July and December 2018 which covered more than 100,000 households across rural and urban India.It found that in rural areas, there were 71.3% of households with access to a toilet – so less than three-quarters. And it said of those households which did have access to a toilet, 3.5% never used it.

The report also highlights that the situation in some states is much worse than in others. For example more than 50% of rural households in Odisha state have no toilet.The results appear at odds with another government report, the 2018-19 National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey, which showed that 93.3% of rural households had access to toilets.On the anniversary of Gandhi’s birth last month, Mr Modi announced that all of India’s villages had declared themselves free of open defecation as part of his “Clean India” mission.He did not include urban India, and the latest official information for urban areas shows that there are still some 50 or so localities yet to declare themselves free from open defecation.It’s certainly true that many millions of toilets have been built using public money, mainly in rural areas of the country.The toilet building programe under the BJP government reached a peak in 2017-18 when nearly 30 million new toilets were built