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Sanitation · indicator 31

Population practising open defecation

Rahul ahead

Rahul India

27.56

synthetic 2016

Modi India

27.83

actual 2016

Difference

+1%

vs counterfactual

Placebo rank

27/35

p = 0.77

What this measures

Population practising open defecation is the share of the population without access to any toilet. A falling number is an improvement.

India stood at 36.07 in 2013, before the two paths separate. By 2016 Modi’s current India had fallen to 27.83, while Rahul’s India — the blend of comparison countries that tracked India before 2014 — reached 27.56.

That leaves Modi’s current India 1% higher than Rahul’s India — worse than where comparable economies ended up. Modi’s current India ranks 27/35 against placebo countries (p = 0.771) — within the range chance produces, so the gap is not distinguishable from noise.

Both paths, 1984–2016

Weights fitted on 2000-2013 only; the counterfactual is projected across 2014-2016.

Modi India · actualRahul India · syntheticRahul ahead

Divergence

Modi India minus Rahul India, in % of population.

What Rahul’s India is made of

Donor weights, solved on pre-2014 data. 34 countries in the pool; those not listed carry zero weight.

  • Cambodia
    43.3%
  • Ethiopia
    22.7%
  • Nepal
    22.7%
  • Indonesia
    9.5%
  • Mexico
    1.8%

Method & reliability

Measure
open_defec_pct
Source type
Direct measure
Estimation window
2000-2013
Projection window
2014-2016
Donor pool
34 countries
Pre-2014 fit (RMSPE)
0.2% of pre-period mean
Placebo rank
27/35
Standardised p-value
0.771
BH-adjusted q across tier 1
0.864

The q-value applies a Benjamini–Hochberg correction across all 20 indicators with a counterfactual. We report p as the primary figure because each indicator is treated as a separate question rather than one family of hypotheses — but no result on this site survives q ≤ 0.10, and a reader who prefers the family view should read the p-values accordingly.

How this was calculated

Nothing here is chosen by hand. The comparison countries are not picked for being like India — they are whatever mix best reproduces India’s own path before 2014 on this particular measure.

  1. 1Describe India before 2014

    India's population practising open defecation is summarised over 2000-2013 — the value at five evenly spaced years starting 2000, plus three background controls averaged across the whole window: GDP per capita, urbanisation and life expectancy.

  2. 2Find the blend that matches it

    Each of the 34 comparison countries is described the same way. An optimiser then searches for the weighted mix of them whose pre-2014 path sits closest to India's. Weights cannot be negative and must sum to 100%, so the result is always a real combination of real countries — never an extrapolation.

  3. 3Check the match is good enough

    The blend misses India's actual pre-2014 path by 0.2% on average. That is close enough to treat the projection as meaningful.

  4. 4Project it forward and compare

    The weights are frozen and applied to 2014-2016, years the optimiser never saw. That projection is Rahul's India. The difference against what actually happened is the gap shown above.

  5. 5Test it against the other countries

    The whole procedure is re-run pretending each comparison country was the one treated in 2014. India's break ranks 27/35 against those placebos, giving p = 0.771 — well within what chance produces, so this gap is not distinguishable from noise.

Why Cambodia?

Cambodia carries 43% of the weight here — not because it resembles India economically or politically, but because its population practising open defecation moved like India’s did between 2000 and 2013. On 21 of the other 27 indicators on this site it carries no weight at all; where it does appear, the largest is government-measured rural sanitation coverage / odf at 46%. The blend is re-solved from scratch for every indicator, which is why the same country can dominate one estimate and be absent from the next.

5 of 34 comparison countries carry any weight at all. The rest are assigned zero by the optimiser.

The counterfactual is 'India without the 2014 structural break', estimated from comparator countries. It is not a forecast of any individual's policies. Sources: World Bank WDI API (2026-07-13); IRENA via Our World in Data.