The Union health ministry has suspended the head of its institution that conducts nationwide family health surveys, citing administrative irregularities but stirring speculation whether data on open defecation from its latest study had displeased the Centre.

The health ministry said on Saturday it had suspended K.S. James, director of the International Institute of Population Sciences (IIPS), Mumbai, after a fact-finding committee detected “irregularities in 11 of 35 complaints relating to appointments, recruitment and compliance with reservation roster”.

The fact-finding committee has also recommended a detailed inquiry against the registrars concerned and the director, the ministry said in a note circulated to the media. It said the director seemed to have failed to detect the irregularities and take corrective action.

James was not immediately available for his response to the ministry’s note. The Telegraph’s calls to his phone number remained unanswered.

The ministry said the director’s presence may have minimised cooperation of other IIPS officials with the investigating team. “Therefore it was felt necessary to prevent this avoidable interference in a free-and-fair investigation to gather sufficient documentary evidence and corroborating facts and circumstantial evidence to frame a firm chargesheet to institute a fair disciplinary proceeding against the director, IIPS, and other officers (if required),” the ministry said.

The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2019-21 released by the IIPS last year had found that nearly one in five households in India practised open defecation, although the Centre had said the count had become “negligible” in 2019.

The survey had found that around 80 per cent of over 636,000 households sampled across the country had access to a toilet, and 19 per cent had no facility, implying that members of those households practised open defecation.

The Narendra Modi government had launched the Swachh Bharat Mission in October 2014 to eliminate open defecation. At a public event at the Sabarmati Riverfront in Ahmedabad on October 2, 2019, five years after the mission’s launch, Modi had told a gathering that the number of people practising open defecation had gone down from 600 million to “negligible” through an intensive behaviour change programme under the mission.

James’s suspension has triggered speculation whether the NFHS data on open defecation or other aspects of the survey might have irked the Centre, but a senior IIPS faculty member said there was no evidence for such a dispute.

“The government continues to rely extensively on the NFHS data — only earlier this month, the Niti Aayog (the government’s apex think tank) published its national multidimensional poverty index report that had exclusively relied on NFHS data,” the faculty member said.

“If the government is unhappy, why would it continue to cite the NFHS data?” said the faculty member, who requested not to be named.

“The findings on open defecation are contradictory to what the government has claimed. But achieving80 per cent access to toilet facilities is itself a feat. It is possible that many people prefer open defecation and do not use toilets.”