India said every government school had a working toilet by 2015. What the government’s own audit found instead

A school’s sanitation gets treated as a box to tick once and forget. A CAG audit, funding records and court cases show why the box stays ticked long after the toilet stops working, and who ends up paying the cost when it does.

Ranjini Krishnaswamy | WASH researcher and school health consultant

On 15 August 2014, the Prime Minister announced that every government school in India would have a working toilet, with separate facilities for girls, within one year. The Ministry of Human Resource Development launched Swachh Bharat Swachh Vidyalaya to deliver it, pulling in funding from Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan and 64 public sector undertakings. By 15 August 2015, the government reported that 4,17,796 toilets had been built or made functional across 2,61,400 schools, and declared 100 percent access achieved nationwide. A Comptroller and Auditor General audit, tabled in Parliament some years later, physically checked a sample of 2,695 of the toilets that 53 central public sector enterprises had reported as built, across 15 states. Close to 40 percent were non-existent, only partly constructed, or simply unused. More than 70 percent had no running water. Three in four were not being maintained hygienically. The gap between what got reported to Delhi and what a CAG inspector found on the ground is the entire subject of this essay.

Why do toilets that get built stop working?

Construction was never really the hard part. Maintenance is, and the money for it says so plainly. Schools receive an annual Composite School Grant under Samagra Shiksha, scaled to enrolment: roughly ₹10,000 a year for a school with up to 30 students, rising to ₹25,000, ₹50,000 and ₹75,000 as enrolment grows. Of that, the guidelines require only a fixed slice, about 10 percent, be reserved for what the scheme calls the Swachhta Action Plan: for the smallest schools, that works out to roughly ₹1,000 a year to keep a toilet block clean, watered and repaired. That single-digit-thousand-rupee figure has to cover cleaning materials, minor plumbing, and often the cleaning itself, since many schools have no sanctioned safai karamchari post at all. A toilet built once under a national campaign and left to a four-figure annual budget for the rest of its life is not a maintenance plan. It is a countdown to the next CAG finding.

Who ends up doing the cleaning when no one is budgeted to do it?

A Comptroller and Auditor General audit that physically inspected toilets built under India’s flagship school sanitation campaign found that more than seven in ten had no running water at all.

When a school has no sanctioned cleaning staff and no real maintenance budget, someone still has to clean the toilet, and in a documented number of Indian schools, that someone has turned out to be children from Dalit and other marginalised communities, assigned the task specifically because of their caste. The Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front surveyed 441 schools across the state (321 government, 58 government-aided, 62 private) using around 250 volunteers over three months, and found 15 schools where Dalit students were made to clean toilets or kept separate from other students at lunch, part of a wider pattern of caste bias documented in roughly 30 percent of the schools surveyed. In January 2024, police in Tamil Nadu’s Erode district registered a case against a government school headmistress under the Juvenile Justice Act and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, after she was accused of singling out six children from Scheduled Caste families to clean the school toilet; one child’s mother said he was hospitalised with dengue after repeated contact with bleaching powder used in the cleaning. A school that can’t budget for sanitation staff hasn’t just created a maintenance problem. It has created an opening for exactly this kind of abuse, and the opening isn’t hypothetical.

Does the sanitation gap actually change children’s health and attendance?

The global evidence here is more honest than clean. Systematic reviews of water, sanitation and hygiene interventions in schools across low-income countries have found real reductions in pupil-reported diarrhoeal disease, in the range of 29 to 50 percent in some studies, alongside lower rates of respiratory illness. The effect on attendance specifically is less consistent: several randomised trials have found WASH improvements reduce absence, but just as many have found no significant change once the intervention ends, which points to maintenance again rather than construction as the variable that actually matters. A 2020-23 intervention study across eight ashram schools serving Adivasi children in Wardha district, Maharashtra, tested exactly this question locally, tracking WASH practices, diarrhoeal disease, respiratory infection and absenteeism among residential students for whom shared eating, sleeping and sanitation facilities make disease transmission a standing risk. The honest reading of this evidence isn’t that better toilets automatically fix attendance. It’s that a toilet with no water and no maintenance budget was never going to test the theory fairly in the first place.

What does the most recent data say?

UDISE+ 2023-24 data reports that 97 percent of India’s 1.47 million schools have separate toilets for girls, 96.2 percent for boys, and 95.9 percent have handwashing facilities, numbers that read as close to universal coverage. A NITI Aayog assessment placed before the Supreme Court in 2026, during compliance hearings on a separate ruling about menstrual health facilities, found a different picture at ground level: 98,592 government schools with no functional toilet for girls, and 61,540 with no usable toilet of any kind. It is the same gap the CAG found in 2020, turning up again six years later in a different audit, which suggests it isn’t a one-off failure so much as a standing feature of how school sanitation gets reported.

What to do

Physically walk your school’s toilet block this week and check what a form never will: does the door lock, is there water at the tap, is there light, is there privacy. A register that says the toilet exists is not the same information as a toilet that works.

Find out exactly how much of your school’s Composite School Grant is earmarked for the Swachhta Action Plan this year, and whether that amount was actually spent on sanitation rather than absorbed into general repairs.

Put in writing, as an explicit school policy circulated to all staff, that no student is ever assigned toilet-cleaning duty for any reason. If any staff member is already doing this, treat it as the serious legal matter it is under the Juvenile Justice Act and the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, not as a minor discipline issue.

If your school has no sanctioned safai karamchari post, flag the gap in writing to your district education office rather than absorbing the shortfall informally through students or teachers.

Add toilet functionality, water, lock, light, hygiene, to a standing monthly checklist rather than an annual, once-a-year report, since every audit that has actually gone and looked has found a different reality than the one on paper.

Sources: Ministry of Human Resource Development and Press Information Bureau, Swachh Bharat Swachh Vidyalaya announcements (2014-2016) · Comptroller and Auditor General of India, audit of school toilets constructed by central public sector enterprises, tabled in Parliament · UDISE+ 2023-24 Report, Ministry of Education, Government of India · Composite School Grant guidelines, Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan · Tamil Nadu Untouchability Eradication Front, school survey on caste discrimination (2024) · Police case records, Erode district, Tamil Nadu (January 2024) · NITI Aayog school sanitation assessment, cited in Supreme Court compliance hearings (2026)