Global Report Shows 50 Million Indian Children Lack School Sanitation

Fifty million Indian children still lacked access to sanitation services in their schools as of 2025, giving India the highest total in the world out of a global figure of 244 million children. A new global report titled 'Progress on drinking water, sanitation and hygiene in schools 2015-2025' highlights this challenge alongside other water and hygiene gaps as part of the Sustainable Development Goals set for 2030. Only a few other nations faced numbers close to this, with Nigeria recording 34 million children without school sanitation, Ethiopia at 26 million, the Democratic Republic of the Congo at 11 million, and Indonesia at 8 million. On a positive note, the report serves as a decadal report card for the Swachh Bharat Mission launched on October 2, 2014, noting that India achieved a 14% reduction in schools lacking sanitation services. Regarding hygiene, the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme report shows that 362 million children globally had no hygiene service at school in 2025, with 20 million of them in India. The report also points out data gaps, noting that Central and Southern Asia lacked sufficient recent data to generate estimates for India beyond 2024. Despite these hurdles, India stands among 28 out of 62 countries currently on track to reach universal coverage of basic drinking water in schools by 2030. Worldwide, 258 million children still lacked school drinking water in 2025, and Indian schools accounted for 12 million of them, meaning roughly one out of every 20 children globally. India, Panama, the Syrian Arab Republic, Togo, and Tuvalu increased coverage by over 4% per year, showing that rapid improvement is possible. Furthermore, while basic water coverage gaps normally persist between different school levels and between rural and urban areas, the report found this gap did not apply to India, Cambodia, and Fiji.