WHO-UNICEF Report Finds 50 Million Indian Schoolchildren Lack Any Sanitation Service, Highest Globally

Key facts

• In 2025, about 50 million Indian schoolchildren attended schools with no sanitation service, the highest absolute figure of any country, followed by Nigeria (34 million), Ethiopia (26 million), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (11 million) and Indonesia (8 million).
• The WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme report, titled Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in Schools 2015-2025, found that of 244 million children globally with no school sanitation, roughly one in five was in India.
• The proportion of Indian schools without any sanitation service dropped by about 14 percentage points over the 2015-2025 decade.
• Under WHO-UNICEF criteria, basic sanitation requires improved, single-sex, fully functional toilets; globally 460 million children lacked basic sanitation, comprising 244 million with no service and 216 million with limited facilities.
• In 2025, 77 percent of schools worldwide had basic sanitation (up from 67 percent in 2015), 11 percent had limited facilities, and 12 percent had no service.
• At current rates, only about 81 percent of schools will have basic sanitation by 2030, so achieving the SDG target of universal school WASH coverage requires roughly a fivefold acceleration.
• In 2025, about 429 million children globally lacked basic drinking water services and 545 million lacked basic hygiene facilities at school; coverage stood at 78 percent for drinking water and 72 percent for hygiene.
• India's Swachh Bharat Mission, launched in 2014, drove large-scale latrine construction and helped expand household sanitation access nationwide, according to UNICEF.