The Effect of India's Total Sanitation Campaign on Defecation Behaviors and Child Health in Rural Madhya Pradesh: A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

Poor sanitation is thought to be a major cause of enteric infections among young children. However, there are no previously published randomized trials to measure the health impacts of large-scale sanitation programs. India's Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) is one such program that seeks to end the practice of open defecation by changing social norms and behaviors, and providing technical support and financial subsidies. The objective of this study was to measure the effect of the TSC implemented with capacity building support from the World Bank's Water and Sanitation Program in Madhya Pradesh on availability of individual household latrines (IHLs), defecation behaviors, and child health (diarrhea, highly credible gastrointestinal illness [HCGI], parasitic infections, anemia, growth). We conducted a cluster-randomized, controlled trial in 80 rural villages. Field staff collected baseline measures of sanitation conditions, behaviors, and child health (May–July 2009), and revisited households 21 months later (February–April 2011) after the program was delivered. The study enrolled a random sample of 5,209 children Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary Diarrheal diseases are linked with the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young children each year in resource-limited countries. Infection with enteric pathogens (organisms such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites that infect the human intestine or gut) also affects the health and growth of many young children in these countries. A major contributor to the transmission of enteric pathogens is thought to be open defecation, which can expose individuals to direct contact with human feces containing infectious pathogens and also contaminate food and drinking water. Open defecation can be reduced by ensuring that people have access to and use toilets or latrines. Consequently, programs have been initiated in many resource-limited countries that aim to reduce open defecation by changing behaviors and by providing technical and financial support to help households build improved latrines (facilities that prevent human feces from re-entering the environment such as pit latrines with sealed squat plates; an example of an unimproved facility is a simple open hole). However, in 2011, according to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, more than 1 billion people (15% of the global population) still defecated in the open. Studies of sewerage system provision in urban areas suggest that interventions that prevent human feces entering the environment reduce diarrheal diseases. However, little is known about how rural sanitation programs, which usually focus on providing stand-alone sanitation facilities, affect diarrheal disease, intestinal parasite infections, anemia (which can be caused by parasite infections), or growth in young children. Governments and international donors need to know whether large-scale rural sanitation programs improve child health before expending further resources on these interventions or to identify an urgency to improve the existing program design or implementation so that they deliver the health impact. In this study, the researchers investigate the effect of India's Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) on the availability of individual household latrines, defecation behaviors, and child health in rural Madhya Pradesh, one of India's less developed states. Sixty percent of people who practice open defection live in India and a quarter of global child deaths from diarrheal diseases occur in the country. India's TSC, which was initiated in 1999, includes activities designed to change social norms and behaviors and provides technical and financial support for latrine building. So far there are no published studies that rigorously evaluated whether the TSC improved child health or not. A cluster randomized controlled trial randomly assigns groups of people to receive the intervention under study and compares the outcomes with a control group that does not receive the intervention. The researchers enrolled 5,209 children aged under 5 years old living in 3,039 households in 80 rural villages in Madhya Pradesh. Half of the villages (40), chosen at random, were included in the TSC (the intervention)....