Households’ Toilet Facility in Rural India: Socio-spatial Analysis Arjun Kumar 1 Abstract The 2030 agenda on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlights the importance of sanitation and sets the Goal #6: ‘Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all’. While rural households in India have witnessed a marginal improvement in access to toilet facility in recent decades, they continue to face high levels of deprivation along with spatial and socio-economic disparities and exclusions, which have been highlighted in this article using data from Census of India, National Sample Surveys and Baseline Survey. Determinants of households having access to latrine facility in the house have been estimated using an econometric exercise and contribution of caste-based factors of the gap in access among various social groups have been estimated using decomposition technique on household-level information from National Sample Survey data. Households located in backward regions and belonging to the weaker sections of society, such as poor, wage labourers, Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes, have been found to be the most deprived and excluded. Thus, there is an urgent need to pace up the developmental efforts for rural sanitation to achieve the SDGs, along with complementary measures to focus on backward regions, weaker sections and socio-spatial position of households in rural India. Keywords Toilet, sanitation, socio-spatial analysis, decomposition, SDGs Introduction Recognizing that greater progress on sanitation is essential for fighting poverty, ensuring proper health to all and for achieving all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the United Nations (UN) has renewed its commitment and determination on ‘Target 7c’ (which exhorted the nation states to commit to ‘Halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation’) to make a headway towards progress on the sanitation and water goals and end the Article Indian Journal of Human Development 11(2) 1–20 © 2017 Institute for Human Development SAGE Publications sagepub.in/home.nav DOI: 10.1177/0973703017716602 http://ijhd.sagepub.com 1 Visiting Fellow, Institute for Human Development (IHD), Delhi, India. Corresponding author: Arjun Kumar, Visiting Fellow, Institute for Human Development (IHD), Delhi, India. E-mail: arjunkumarresearch@gmail.com