Some 503,142 toilets have been installed in households across India since October, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi first announced Clean India Mission, a sanitation campaign that aims to eliminate open defecation by 2019.

It's an ambitious and necessary target. According to the World Health Organization, more than 620 million people—about half India's population—relieve themselves in the open, a practice with serious negative impacts on public health, safety, and the economy.

India has a lot more to overcome than just a mass installation of toilets and latrines. In a recent survey  of 3,200 rural households by Delhi-based Research Institute for Compassionate Economics, half of respondents who didn't have a toilet believed that "defecating in the open is the same or better for health than using a latrine." Most people who owned a government-constructed latrine still chose to use the outdoors. Some end up using their loo for storage or extra living space.

Modi's administration announced Wednesday that sanitary inspectors will soon be going door-to-door to "check and verify the use of toilets," using tablets or phones to publish results online in "real time," according to a press release. "Earlier, the monitoring was done only about the construction of toilets, but now the actual use of toilets will be ascertained."

….

Others have warned that public outreach and educational campaigns should figure much more prominently in Clean India's strategy. Only 8 percent of the $30 billion dedicated to the mission is marked for "information, education and communication."