By Ankit Tulsyan1 and Girija Bharat

The Joint Monitoring Programme, assessing the water and sanitation status globally, reveals that about fifty percent of open defecators of the world are from India. Many other studies indicate that among people who practice open defecation in India, a significant number of them prefer to do so despite having access to toilets. Even today, one in every ten urban resident goes for open defecation. This indicates that mere focus on building toilets is not sufficient and significant push is required for bringing in behavioural change.

In comparison to rural sanitation, urban sanitation has not received adequate attention at the national level in the past and fewer initiatives have been taken to tackle deficiencies in urban sanitation. Similarly, in comparison to urban water supply schemes, urban sanitation has traditionally been receiving much less fund allocations. While some progress has been made in terms of urban sanitation coverage after the launch of National Urban Sanitation Policy 2008,the service is generally of poor quality and is unsustainable, heavily reliant on government subsidies for capital as well as operations & maintenance costs. The World Bank-MoUD Report (2012): Improving Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Services in India states that poor managerial and financial autonomy, limited accountability, weak cost recovery, perverse incentives and limited capacity of urban local bodies (ULBs)have led to poor services across the country.

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With emerging business models around community toilets (a mix of 'Pay and Use' model combined with recycling faecal sludge in to fertilizers), attractive economic incentives like discount vouchers to users can be designed to attract people to use these toilets on a daily basis and bring in behavioural change. There are already few organizations who have started adopting similar schemes like 'Use and get paid' to expand users of community toilets. One of such models has been recently cleared by the Standing Committee of Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation ( AMC). This concept has also been promoted by an NGO named SCOPE in the Tiruchirappalli District of Tamil Nadu, which uses the waste for farming purposes in an environmentally safe manner. Similarly, a Kenya based organization named Sanergy has taken systems-based approach to solve the sanitation challenge sustainably. They have built a network of fresh life toilets run by operators picked from the informal settlements. At a centralized location, the waste from these sanitation facilities is converted into useful by-products such as organic fertilizer and renewable energy. These organic fertilizers meet the WHO compliance standards and are sold to a variety of Kenyan farmers.

  • 1. Ankit Tulsyan is Consultant, TERI and Girija Bhara is Fellow, TERI. This publication is part of a research study on Urban Water and Sanitation in India, which is coordinated by Coca-Cola Department of Regional Water Studies at TERI University, New Delhi and is funded by the USAID.