India built over 100 million toilets under the Swachh Bharat Mission in less than a decade — one of the largest infrastructure pushes in sanitation history. On paper, thousands of villages have been declared “Open Defecation Free” (ODF). But walk through many of these villages at dawn, and the old paths to the fields are still worn smooth by footsteps. A toilet standing unused is not a sanitation outcome — it’s a monument to a target met on paper.

The uncomfortable truth is that construction was always the easier half of the problem. Digging a pit, laying bricks, fixing a door — these are logistics. Convincing a household that has defecated in the open for three generations to change a deeply personal, habitual practice is a different order of challenge entirely. Add to this the toilets that were built without water access, without functioning drainage, or in locations that made emptying pits someone else’s unspoken burden — often a burden that falls on manual scavengers from marginalised communities — and “coverage” starts to look like a very incomplete word for what sanitation actually requires.

The Metric That Ate the Mission

Large public programmes need numbers to report progress, and toilet construction offered a clean, countable one. A toilet either exists or it doesn’t. That made it fundable, auditable, and photogenic — perfect for a ribbon-cutting, perfect for a dashboard. Usage, by contrast, is messy to measure. It requires repeated household visits, honest self-reporting on a private habit, and tracking over months and years rather than a single verification survey at the point of construction.

So the system optimised for what it could count. Village after village hit its construction target and was certified ODF, often based on a single point-in-time verification. What followed that certification — whether the toilet kept being used six months later, whether the water supply that made it usable in the first place held up through a dry season, whether the pit was ever safely emptied — mostly went untracked. The result is a familiar pattern in development work: the map got optimised, and the territory quietly diverged from it.

Three Reasons the Toilet Sits Empty

Water, not want, is often the real constraint. A toilet without a reliable water source is a toilet that’s difficult or unpleasant to use, especially for flushing and cleaning. In many regions where toilets were built rapidly, water infrastructure lagged behind or was never planned as part of the same intervention. Households didn’t reject the toilet out of preference for the open field — they found the toilet impractical to maintain.

Open defecation is not merely a lack of access — it’s a socialised habit. For generations, open defecation was normalised, sometimes even preferred, as a social and even leisurely practice, particularly among older men in some communities. Changing this required sustained behaviour-change communication — the kind that takes years of community engagement, not a one-time toilet handover. Many construction-first programmes under-invested in this layer, treating it as a soft, secondary activity rather than the primary determinant of success.

Nobody owns the toilet after it’s built. Once a toilet is constructed and photographed for the record, the implementing agency’s incentive to stay engaged often drops sharply. Maintenance, pit-emptying, and repair fall to households that may lack the money, the mason, or the awareness of how to keep the system functioning. A toilet with a broken door, a collapsed pit cover, or no water becomes disused — and once disused, old habits reassert themselves quickly.

The Water Problem Nobody Sees

Perhaps the least visible consequence of this gap is what happens to water. Faecal sludge that isn’t safely contained or emptied doesn’t disappear — it leaches into groundwater, particularly in densely populated rural belts where water tables sit close to the surface and hand pumps or open wells remain the primary drinking source. This is the quiet, cumulative cost of “unsafe disposal”: not a dramatic failure, but a slow contamination that shows up months or years later as diarrhoeal disease, especially in children under five.

This is the part of the sanitation chain that construction-focused programmes rarely account for. A village can have zero open defecation and still have contaminated drinking water, if the toilets built are emptied unsafely or sited too close to water sources. Sanitation, in other words, is a system — toilet, water, waste management, and disposal — not a single structure. Measuring only the first link in that chain and calling the system solved is where the gap begins.

What “Sanitation” Should Actually Mean

The Swachh Bharat Mission’s achievement in scaling toilet construction is real and shouldn’t be dismissed — it put sanitation on the national agenda in a way nothing before it had. But the next phase of the work, the one that determines whether that investment translates into actual public health gains, is behavioural, infrastructural, and institutional in ways that resist easy counting.

Sanitation, properly understood, has to mean sustained usage, safe waste management, and clean water — not just the presence of a structure. Until programmes, funders, and governments start measuring and funding for those three things with the same rigour they once applied to counting toilets, the gap between what was built and how people actually live will persist — and so will its costs.

In our next piece, we look at what’s working: how CSR-funded sanitation programmes are starting to close this gap by funding the unglamorous middle — behaviour change, maintenance, and monitoring — rather than just the build.