Five crore Indian children still lack access to sanitation service in their schools, says UN report
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The report titled ‘Progress on drinking water, sanitation and hygiene in schools 2015-2025’ shows the progress as well as the challenges India is facing in meeting the water, sanitation and hygiene goals that are part of SDG goals for 2030. The image is used for representative purposes only. | Photo Credit: M.A. SRIRAM
India had the highest number of children with no sanitation service in schools, with 50 million out of the world total of 244 million as of 2025, according to a new global report. Only Nigeria (34 million), Ethiopia (26 million), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (11 million) or Indonesia (8 million) had a comparatively large number of schoolchildren who had no access to sanitation service.
The data from ‘Progress on drinking water, sanitation and hygiene in schools 2015-2025’ shows the progress as well as the challenges India is facing in meeting the water, sanitation and hygiene goals that are part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) set for 2030.
The report can also be seen as a decadal report card on the Swachh Bharat Mission, which was launched in India on October 2, 2014. The report cites the achievement of India which saw a 14% reduction in schools with no sanitation service.
The WHO/UNICEF report that is part of the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) shows that globally, 362 million children still had no hygiene service at their school in 2025. Of these, 20 million were from India.
It is not just lack of access that the WHO report flags about India but also gaps in data. “There is now sufficient data to estimate trends in basic hygiene coverage between 2015 and 2025 for all SDG regions except Central and Southern Asia where there were insufficient recent data to generate estimates for India, and therefore the region, beyond 2024.”
On the brighter side, India is among the 28 out of 62 countries that are on track to achieve universal coverage of basic drinking water in schools by 2030.
As of 2025, there were 258 million children who still had no drinking water service at their school. The number of children from Indian schools made up 12 million of this number or about 1 out 20 children in the world. The report shows that India has made a big progress in basic drinking water services in 2025 and average rates of change between 2015 and 2025. India, Panama, Syrian Arab Republic, Togo and Tuvalu increased coverage by over 4% per year, “demonstrating that rapid progress is possible”.
However, the report found that while gaps in basic water coverage persists between school levels and between rural and urban areas, this did not apply to India, Cambodia and Fiji.
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