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Drain on your health: Sanitation externalities from dirty drains in India
Title / Series / Name
Review of Development Economics
Publication Volume
26
Publication Issue
4
Pages
Editors
Keywords
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14018/13857
Abstract
We highlight an overlooked channel of disease transmission in developing countries: dirty drains. We make the case that sanitation efforts should move to improve the condition of drains to build on increased toilet provision since they are a key transmission channel for waterborne diseases. We develop an economic model of sanitation externalities that incorporates the role of drains and then empirically examine the relationship between the sanitary quality of neighborhood drains and household ill-health incidence using a primary survey of 1,530 households from rural Uttarakhand, India. We find a strong and positive association between household ill-health incidence and dirty neighborhood drains, controlling for household toilet usage, community-level toilet availability, and an array of other household attributes. We employ a variety of robustness checks to validate our findings. Our findings suggest that bringing the policy focus to overall sanitation infrastructure will have substantial health returns.
Topic
Publisher
Place of Publication
Type
Journal article
Date
2022
Language
ISBN
Identifiers
10.1111/rode.12924