Sanitation is a human right and public good providing benefits across society by improving health and socio-economic development. There is still a low adoption rate of different sanitation services and excessively among many rural households in developing countries. Past literature has focused on quantifying the effects of sanitation services by measuring the impact of technology adoption and claims that even a similar approach generates heterogeneous outcomes in a community. Thus, little is known about such heterogeneous outcomes within the community and the existing low rate of adoption of sanitation services. Given this state of affairs, this study utilizes 63,732 household data from the 76^th Round of the National Sample Survey for rural India collected in 2018 to examine the drivers of the adoption of various sanitation services individually or bundled together and assess their impact on related health problems. Our empirical results show that (i) the wealth status of rural households represented by the level of consumption per capita and education levels of household heads are important drivers of the adoption of improved sanitation practices; (ii) female-headed households and households belonging to scheduled castes and tribes are disadvantaged in the adoption of sanitation services and practices, and (iii) adoption of more than one service have a significant effect in reducing health problems. Therefore, sanitation policy programs with other services, such as safe drinking water, waste management, and toilets, should focus on poor households with lower levels of education, female-headed households, and marginalized social groups, viz., scheduled castes and tribes. In addition, concerted policy efforts should promote the provision and uptake of bundling of sanitation services or technologies together to achieve desirable sanitized habit formation for better health outcomes.

JEL Code/s: 118