There has been much debate over the extent to which India’s large scale sanitation program has been successful. One issue is the lack of uniformity in the measurement of sanitation outcomes across surveys, which muddles achievements, and may lead to competing, and inconsistent claims. This paper assembles all available large-scale, nationally representative data sources to empirically evaluate India’s progress on sanitation coverage between 2015 and 2021. We harmonize definitions around the type of toilets constructed as well as use of toilets.  This allows the tracking of sanitation outcomes over time in a comparable and consistent way. We report four main results. First, there was enormous expansion in toilet access although “coverage” remains far from universal. Second, there was significant increase in regular toilet use, especially for the poor and socially disadvantaged groups. Third, there was wide spatial variation in progress across and within states. Finally, the substantial gains in regular toilet use between 2015 and 2019 have slowed or are reversing in most states, particularly amongst poor and marginalized households. The paper outlines several possible reasons for the surprising decline observed in toilet access and use in recent years. 

In 2014, the government of India launched the Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) to accelerate rural sanitation coverage and make India open defecation free by 2019. The program was designed to generate demand for sanitation adoption and advocated a decentralized system for program delivery, constituting one of the largest government efforts in India to achieve a specific development goal. By 2019, over 100 million toilets were built, and the regular use of toilets nearly doubled. However, results varied significantly across states. This paper uses a combination of qualitative methods to unpack the key supply-side drivers of program delivery. It combines a documentation analysis of nineteen large states with in-depth interviews with government officials across all administrative levels in selected states. We find that the ‘whole-of-government’ institutional design of the program and accompanying political leadership and visible public messaging achieved the goal of making sanitation everyone’s responsibility during the program implementation. However, the pressure to deliver in mission mode led to a focus on achieving universal sanitation coverage through toilet construction over sustained behavior change in toilet usage. We also find that while the decentralized format allowed for flexibility to adapt to local conditions, it also revealed and enhanced existing institutional and capacity weaknesses, that while addressed during the program, were not sustained overtime. These findings provide additional insights on the implementation of the Swachh Bharat Mission and offer important lessons to other large-scale efforts in sanitation expansion and other programs aiming to learn from such experience and show that outcome sustainability requires sustained efforts and additional resources. 

A clustered randomized trial in Bangladesh examines alternative strategies to reduce child marriage and teenage childbearing and increase girls’ education. From 2008, girls in treatment communities received either i) a six-month empowerment program, ii) a financial incentive to delay marriage, or iii) empowerment plus incentive. Data from 4.5 years after program completion show that girls eligible for the incentive for at least two years were 24% less likely to be married under 18, 15%  less likely to have given birth under 20, and 25% more likely to be in school at age 22. Girls eligible for the empowerment program were 11% more likely to be in-school at age 22. We also find significant and large effects of the empowerment program on income-generating activities (IGAs): an increase in an IGA index by 0.5SDs.

To what extent do public officials feel they have control over their lives in public service? We develop a new measure of perceived control in the bureaucracy based on the locus of control scale. The ‘Bureaucratic Locus of Control’ (BLOC) scale extends standard measures to a bureaucratic context as well as introduces an extension to these measures that focuses on the power of systemic forces in officials’ lives. Field tests amongst a representative sample of Ethiopian public officials suggest that the BLOC scale has good internal reliability and that it is positively associated with promotion opportunities, rewards and motivation. We showcase its use by investigating the extent to which inequality in control impacts the general perception of control. Potential uses of the scale to study bureaucratic dynamics are discussed. 

Toilet ownership in India has grown in recent years, but open defecation can persist even when rural households own latrines. There are at least two pathways through which social norms inhibit the use of toilets in rural India: (1) beliefs/expectations that others do not use toilets or latrines or find open defecation unacceptable; and (2) beliefs about ritual notions of purity that dissociate latrines from cleanliness. A survey in Uttar Pradesh, India, finds a positive correlation between latrine use and social norms at baseline. To confront these, an information campaign was piloted to test the effectiveness of rebranding latrine use and promoting positive social norms. The intervention targeted mental models by rebranding latrine use and associating it with cleanliness, and it made information about growing latrine use among latrine owners more salient. Following the intervention, open defecation practices went down across all treatment households, with the average latrine use score in treatment villages increasing by up to 11% relative to baseline. Large improvements were also observed in pro-latrine beliefs. This suggests that low-cost information campaigns can effectively improve pro-latrine beliefs and practices, as well as shift perceptions of why many people still find open defecation acceptable. Measuring social norms as described can help diagnose barriers to reducing open defecation, contribute to the quality of large-scale surveys and make development interventions more sustainable.

In recent years, tax authorities around the world have started to use behavioral insights to encourage taxpayers to fulfill their obligations. We review and discuss some of the recent empirical literature on tax compliance. In line with recent trends, we report on a field experiment in collaboration with the State Revenue Service of Latvia (SRS) to encourage previously non-compliant individuals, who also have their own business income, to submit their tax declarations on time in 2017. These individuals were pre-emptively sent emails with behaviorally informed messages in order to reach and influence an important target population at a salient moment. Our results indicate that all of the behaviorally-informed messages increased submissions by the submission deadline when compared to a control group. The best performer was a message that specifically framed non-compliant behavior as a deliberate choice and increased timely submissions by 9.4% (4.1 percentage points; p=0.05).