Misplaced Prioritisation in Sanitation Battle in India
Some Insights from the Global Experience
Keywords:
Water and Sanitation, Sanitation campaign, Sanitation in IndiaAbstract
While the role of safe water and sanitation facilities in ensuring better health and nutritional facilities are well-recognised in the literature and policy discourses, more often than not, they are approached in isolated manners in specific policies to address the issues. The present paper seeks to establish the need to address the issues of access to water and sanitation comprehensively, by analysing World Development Indicator data on a cross-section of 185 countries. With the help of principal component analysis for data reduction and multiple regression of principal components, the paper suggests that although access to improved sanitation facilities plays a critical role in addressing the issues of malnutrition and disease-mortality incidences, access to water cannot be undermined in policies that promote sanitation facilities. While in the case of disease-mortality control efforts, water plays a complementary role along with access to sanitation, in the case of policies to address malnutrition, access to water may play the role of a suppressor variable that enhances the impact of access to sanitation.
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