Year Improved No sanitation

Target 7C of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) calls for halving the proportion of the population (baseline 1990) without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015 (United Nations (UN) 2000). A large developing country like India is critical to meeting this target. Even though the MDGs set out to measure and reduce the population without sustainable access to safe water and sanitation, difficulties have been encountered in measuring ‘safe ’ and ‘sustainable’, which have led to a revision of the target to achieving access to improved sources of water and sanitation (Zetland 2008). It has been argued that the revised goals grossly overestimate the access to safe water an