Sanitation

The set of public health practices and infrastructure concerned with providing clean drinking water and safely managing human excreta and sewage, with the central goal of interrupting disease transmission, particularly along the fecal-oral route. Core sanitation practices include keeping people from contact with feces and promoting handwashing with soap, and adequate sanitation is linked to reductions in diarrheal disease, a major contributor to malnutrition and stunted growth in children, as well as to lower rates of cholera, hepatitis, polio and schistosomiasis. A full sanitation system covers the whole chain from the collection of excreta and wastewater through their transport, treatment, and eventual disposal or reuse, and the practical approaches used to do this range from community-led behavior change programs to container-based collection services to ecological systems built around nutrient recovery. The United Nations recognized access to sanitation as a human right in 2010, and it is now a named target under Sustainable Development Goal 6, though the United Nations estimated in 2024 that about 3.4 billion people worldwide still lacked safely managed sanitation services. Beyond its direct health effects, inadequate sanitation carries a significant economic cost, with India's own losses attributed to poor sanitation estimated at about 6.4 percent of its gross domestic product.