Ensuring Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation in Rural India

Turn on a tap and clean water comes out. Walk into a toilet and it works as it should. These feel like basic expectations, but for millions of rural Indian households, they were once far from guaranteed. Understanding how India built its rural water supply and sanitation programmes tells us a lot about policy design, implementation challenges, and what it actually takes to change everyday behaviour at scale.

This piece looks at four connected building blocks: the Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme (ARWSP), the Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP), the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), and the monitoring systems that were built to track whether any of it actually worked.

Why rural water and sanitation needed a dedicated push 🔗

Access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation directly affects health, school attendance, women’s safety, and productivity. Poor sanitation and contaminated water are linked to diarrhoeal diseases, which remain a major cause of illness in children. Rural India, with its scattered habitations and limited infrastructure, needed programmes that could reach villages the market alone would not serve. That is where ARWSP and CRSP came in, decades apart, one for water and one for sanitation.

The Accelerated Rural Water Supply Programme (ARWSP) 🔗

The ARWSP was launched in 1972-73 by the Government of India to speed up the pace at which villages got access to safe drinking water. The idea was simple: many habitations, especially those affected by drought or water scarcity, could not wait for slow, state-led infrastructure building. The Centre stepped in with financial support so states and union territories could fast-track coverage.

Key features 🔗

ARWSP initially assisted states with 100 percent grants-in-aid to cover “problem villages,” meaning those without any safe source or facing acute scarcity. Over time, its scope widened. States were given more administrative and technical powers to sanction schemes, and by the mid-1990s, the Centre had fully delegated approval powers to state-level committees so implementation would not get stuck in Delhi.

A useful way to think about ARWSP’s evolution is that it moved through three broad priorities:

Coverage first – reaching villages with no water source at all.
Sustainability next – ensuring sources did not dry up or fail after construction.
Quality later – tackling issues like fluoride and arsenic contamination in groundwater.

What happened to ARWSP eventually 🔗

Despite continuous funding increases, the programme did not fully meet its coverage targets by the end of the Eighth Five Year Plan as originally hoped, partly due to insufficient funds and villages slipping back into “not covered” status even after being served once. Rural water investment by the central and state governments together has been substantial over the decades, and this funding was channelled through ARWSP before it was eventually restructured and renamed the National Rural Drinking Water Programme (NRDWP) in 2009, and later folded into the Jal Jeevan Mission in 2019.

The Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) 🔗

While ARWSP dealt with water, sanitation coverage in rural India was strikingly poor well into the 1980s. Census data from that period showed rural sanitation coverage in the low single digits. To address this, the government introduced the CRSP in 1986.

Objectives 🔗

The CRSP aimed to improve the general quality of life in rural areas and, notably, to give women greater privacy and dignity by reducing dependence on open defecation. Its scope was not limited to toilets alone. Sanitation was defined broadly to include solid and liquid waste disposal, food hygiene, and personal and environmental cleanliness.

Components and where it fell short 🔗

CRSP offered subsidies for building individual sanitary latrines, with full subsidy for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and landless labourers, and partial subsidy for others. School sanitation, Information, Education and Communication (IEC) activities, and rural sanitary marts (outlets selling sanitation hardware) were also part of the design.

In practice, CRSP struggled. It was largely supply-driven, meaning toilets were built and handed over regardless of whether households actually wanted or would use them. Studies later found that a large share of rural India continued to practise open defecation even where toilets existed, and the programme had weak links with local institutions and poor construction quality in many cases. School sanitation was also neglected. These gaps set the stage for a redesign.

The Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) 🔗

In 1999, CRSP was restructured into the Total Sanitation Campaign, marking a genuine shift in strategy rather than just a rebrand.

From supply-driven to demand-driven 🔗

TSC moved away from handing out subsidised toilets and instead tried to generate genuine demand for sanitation through awareness campaigns, community mobilisation, and a wider range of affordable toilet designs. Subsidies were restructured as incentives targeted at the poorest households rather than blanket construction grants. The idea was that behaviour change had to come before, or alongside, hardware.

Implementation and components 🔗

TSC’s strategy rested on a few pillars: intensive IEC campaigns involving Panchayati Raj institutions, women’s self-help groups, and NGOs; rural sanitary marts and production centres to make sanitary hardware locally available; school sanitation as an entry point for wider behaviour change; and later, solid and liquid waste management (SLWM) as villages moved beyond individual toilets toward cleaner community environments.

Impact and continuing challenges 🔗

TSC increased the number of toilets built across rural India, but usage remained a persistent problem. Research around the programme found that a majority of the rural population in several sample states continued practising open defecation regardless of toilet availability, which showed that behaviour change is far harder to engineer than infrastructure creation. This lesson directly shaped the later Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin), launched in 2014, which put even greater emphasis on triggering behavioural change alongside toilet construction.

Monitoring and evaluation: did any of this actually work? 🔗

Building water points and toilets is only half the job. Governments needed a way to know whether habitations were truly covered, whether facilities were functioning, and whether money was being spent as intended. This is where monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems came in.

The IMIS backbone 🔗

India developed the Integrated Management Information System (IMIS), an online database designed to track drinking water coverage, water quality, and scheme-level details from the habitation level all the way up to the national level. Researchers studying IMIS have called it a rare example of a country building a comprehensive rural water database, something even wealthier nations have not consistently managed. IMIS allowed policymakers to allocate resources and track results, though studies have also flagged issues with data quality, self-reporting inconsistencies, and gaps in verification.

Independent audits 🔗

Beyond the government’s own dashboards, independent oversight has played a key role. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has periodically conducted performance audits of these programmes. One such audit found that despite the existence of IMIS, several evaluation studies commissioned by the ministry uncovered problems such as non-functioning water schemes, incomplete coverage of schools and anganwadis, and inadequate use of water quality testing kits at the field level. This is a good reminder that self-reported progress and ground reality do not always match, which is exactly why third-party evaluation matters.

From coverage numbers to functionality checks 🔗

Over time, monitoring frameworks matured to ask sharper questions: not just “how many toilets were built” but “how many are actually used,” and not just “how many habitations have a water source” but “how many households have a functional tap connection with adequate water quality.” This shift is visible in the successor programmes. Under the Jal Jeevan Mission, monitoring now tracks functional household tap connections directly, and as of March 2025, around 80 percent of rural households had been reported to have tap water supply, up from under 17 percent when the mission began in 2019.

What these programmes teach us today 🔗

ARWSP and CRSP were products of their time: infrastructure-heavy, centrally funded, and largely top-down. TSC tried to correct course by centring community demand and behaviour change. The Swachh Bharat Mission and Jal Jeevan Mission, which absorbed these older schemes, carried forward the lesson that construction without adoption achieves little, and that monitoring has to measure use and functionality, not just assets created. Budget allocations for these missions continue to be debated each year, with funding for rural sanitation restored in the 2026-27 budget after cuts the previous year, showing that sustaining these gains remains an active policy challenge rather than a finished job.

What do you think? Why do you think demand-driven approaches like TSC struggled to change toilet usage even after construction targets were met? And what role should independent audits play in programmes that rely heavily on self-reported government data?

References

1. https://megphed.gov.in/standards/ARWSPguidelines.pdf
2. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/934081468267356682/pdf/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf
3. https://prod-qt-images.s3.amazonaws.com/indiawaterportal/import/sites/default/files/iwp2/Guidelines_of_the_Central_Rural_Sanitation_Programme_and_Total_Sanitation_Campaign_by_the_Department_of_Drinking_Water_and_Sanitation_2011.pdf
4. https://centreforpublicimpact.org/public-impact-fundamentals/indias-total-sanitation-campaign/
5. https://www.phedmanipur.gov.in/faq/
6. https://iwaponline.com/wp/article/18/4/1015/20517/National-rural-drinking-water-monitoring-progress
7. https://cag.gov.in/uploads/download_audit_report/2017/Chapter_5_Monitoring_and_Evaluation_of_Report_No_15_of_2018_-_Performance_Audit_on_National_Rural_Drinking_Water_Programme_in_Ministry_of_Drinking_Water_an.pdf
8. https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2115688&reg=3&lang=2
9. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/economy/budget-2026-27-restores-big-funding-for-rural-water-and-sanitation-after-steep-cuts-but-delivery-gaps-from-last-year-persist