Manipur’s WASH Progress Hides Deep Spatial Divides, New Study Finds

A new study from Manipur University has mapped, district by district, how access to water, sanitation, and hygiene services changed across the northeastern Indian state of Manipur between 2011 and 2018, and the picture it paints is one of remarkable progress shadowed by stubborn inequality. The research, published in Discover Social Science and Health by geographers Khamnam Michael Meitei and Biswajit Das, combines census data with national survey statistics to build a composite picture of WASH conditions, revealing that while toilets and hygiene facilities have spread to near-universal coverage, the safe disposal of human waste and wastewater remains critically underdeveloped across the state.

The study arrives at a moment when governments and international agencies are shifting their focus from simply counting whether people have access to a toilet or a water point, toward assessing whether those services are safely managed and sustainable. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 6 explicitly calls for safely managed water and sanitation, a standard considerably more demanding than the basic access metrics that dominated the Millennium Development Goal era. Manipur offers a revealing case study of what happens when a region crosses the basic access threshold but has not yet built the infrastructure needed to manage waste safely at scale.

Methodologically, the researchers drew on two complementary data sources: the 2011 Census of India, which provides a comprehensive snapshot of household amenities across all districts, and the 76th Round of the National Sample Survey Office conducted in 2018, which offers a more recent, survey-based view of household conditions. From these sources, the authors selected six indicators spanning the three dimensions of WASH: water supply, sanitation, and hygiene. This multidimensional framing matters because a household may enjoy piped water yet still practice unsafe excreta disposal, and single-indicator assessments would miss such imbalances entirely.

To condense these six indicators into a single comparable measure, the researchers employed Principal Component Analysis, a statistical technique that identifies the underlying dimensions along which districts differ most strongly. Rather than retaining only the first principal component, as many composite index studies do, the authors kept all components with eigenvalues greater than one, a standard threshold that preserves multiple independent dimensions of variation. This choice reflects the genuinely multidimensional nature of WASH conditions: districts can excel on water access while lagging on waste management, and a single-component index would obscure exactly the kind of trade-offs that matter for policy.

The headline finding is a story of two very different trajectories. Sanitation and hygiene indicators improved dramatically over the seven-year study window, reaching near-universal coverage across the state. This surge aligns with the period of intensive national sanitation campaigns in India, which poured resources into household toilet construction and hygiene promotion throughout the 2010s. Yet the same period saw far weaker movement on water supply, where access to improved sources remains uneven across districts, and on the safe disposal of excreta and wastewater, which the study describes as critically low. In other words, Manipur built the visible infrastructure of sanitation faster than it built the hidden systems that make sanitation genuinely safe.

Perhaps the most striking result concerns the geography of these changes. Manipur’s development discourse has long been organized around a valley–hill divide, with the Imphal Valley, home to the state’s administrative and economic core, generally outpacing the surrounding hill districts, where terrain is steeper, settlements more dispersed, and infrastructure costlier to deliver. The study’s spatial analysis shows that this traditional pattern is shifting. Several hill districts recorded meaningful improvements in their WASH profiles, while some valley districts stagnated or improved only minimally. This reversal suggests that targeted interventions in historically disadvantaged areas can bear fruit, and that prosperity in the valley does not automatically translate into better services for all its districts.

To quantify these disparities rigorously, the authors applied inequality measures, including the Theil index, a decomposition-friendly statistic widely used in economics and geography to measure how unevenly a resource is distributed across units. The results were asymmetric in a way that carries direct policy implications: inequality in water access was moderate, indicating that while gaps exist, they are not extreme. Inequality in wastewater management, by contrast, was extremely high, meaning that a small number of districts account for nearly all of the state’s capacity to manage wastewater safely while the rest lag far behind. This concentration means that the average district-level statistic conceals a landscape where safe waste management is effectively a privilege of a few places.

The temporal dimension of the analysis adds a further layer of nuance through rank mobility analysis, which tracks whether districts moved up or down in relative performance between 2011 and 2018. The findings demonstrate a genuine reordering of district rankings over time, confirming that the changes observed were not uniform shifts that lifted all districts equally. Some districts climbed the ladder while others slipped, a dynamic that complicates any assumption that yesterday’s laggards remain today’s priorities. For planners, this implies that resource allocation formulas based on outdated rankings risk misdirecting funds away from districts that have fallen behind more recently.

The study’s authors argue that these findings together demand a fundamental reorientation of WASH policy in Manipur and, by extension, in comparable regions. Access-based interventions, which measure success by counting connections and toilets, have largely done their job in the state. What is needed now, they contend, is integrated, sustainability-oriented planning that treats water supply, excreta management, and wastewater treatment as a connected system rather than as separate targets. District-specific strategies are essential because the study shows that the binding constraint differs from place to place: in some districts it is water supply reliability, in others it is the near-total absence of safe waste disposal.

The broader significance of this research extends well beyond Manipur’s borders. It offers a methodological template for other states and countries seeking to move beyond headline coverage statistics toward a more honest accounting of service quality and equity. By combining PCA-based composite indexing with spatial analysis, inequality decomposition, and rank mobility tracking, the study demonstrates how routinely collected census and survey data can be transformed into actionable intelligence about where progress is real, where it is superficial, and where the next phase of investment should be directed. As governments worldwide confront the gap between basic access and safely managed services, the Manipur case is a timely reminder that the last mile of WASH development, the one involving waste that must be safely contained, transported, and treated, is often the hardest and the most unequally distributed of all.

Subject of Research: Spatial inequality and temporal change in water, sanitation, and hygiene services across districts of Manipur, India

Article Title: Spatial inequality and temporal dynamics of water sanitation and hygiene services in Manipur

Article References: Meitei, K. M., & Das, B. (2026). Spatial inequality and temporal dynamics of water sanitation and hygiene services in Manipur. Discover Social Science and Health, 6(1), Article 109. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44155-026-00445-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44155-026-00445-z

Keywords: WASH, water supply, sanitation, hygiene, Manipur, spatial inequality, Principal Component Analysis, composite index, Theil index, wastewater management, district-level analysis, India