Author: cprindia

Context: What is the research about?

In Delhi, as in many other Indian cities, millions of men, women and children who live in slums and informal settlements have to daily confront the lack of adequate sanitation facilities. These sanitation inequalities impact the health and socioeconomic status of women and girls more because of their greater social vulnerability to sexual violence, as well as the role played by biology in their need for privacy, safety and cleanliness.

• Who or what is responsible for such socioeconomic consequences of the lack of adequate sanitation infrastructure in Indian cities, which perpetuate gender inequalities?
• How do issues like gender-based violence impact the everyday lives of women and girls living in slums in particular?

This project report examines these issues using the notion of infrastructural violence and then examines the harms and suffering caused by a lack of sanitation infrastructure in two long-established localities in Delhi: Mangolpuri and Kusumpur Pahari. The study was an ethnographic research carried out over months of extensive interviews and case studies.

What is infrastructural violence?

One approach to understanding the harms inflicted when urban sanitation infrastructures malfunction is to use the concept of infrastructural violence that seeks to identify the political economy underlying the socio-spatial production of suffering in contemporary cities.

This research report focuses on the notion of passive exclusion of women and girls from sanitation infrastructures. When women and girls from slum communities are forced to enter dangerous spaces daily to satisfy their biological needs due to their physical exclusion from sanitation infrastructure (due to various reasons like safety, cost, social norms), they are often exposed to gendered, caste and class-based forms of both physical and emotional violence, which can produce immediate and lifelong multiple harms, sufferings and exclusions.

Who were the participants?

The women and girls who participated in this survey ranged in age from 17 to 60 years. There were five women in the 20-24 age group, eight women in the 25-29 age group, three in the 55-59 age group, two each in the 15-19, 45-49 and 55-59 age groups, and one in the 60-65 age group, which provided a good diversity of experiences.

20 were married, nine were single and two were widowed. They were residents of Kusumpur Pahari, an urban village in south Delhi, and JJC (Jhuggi Jhopri Clusters) pockets of Mangolpuri, which is a resettlement colony in West Delhi.

What were the findings?

• Research findings on how private and community toilets are used in Mangolpuri and Kusumpur Pahari highlight the frequent inaccuracy of statistics collected in household surveys. Persons conducting such surveys generally presume that if a household has a toilet facility there is no need for further questions on other sanitation activities. But as this research’s survey has shown, some members of households with private toilets still use community toilet complexes (CTCs) or open defecation (OD) sites often due to issues such as lack of water in the case of Kusumpur Pahari, or the inconvenient location within a household for an elderly woman.
• For participants from households who use CTCs every day, the patterns of usage are determined by the opening hours. When CTCs are closed during the day, or after 10 pm, residents are left with no choice but OD.
• Design flaws like half-doors or open roofs also dissuade women from using a toilet block due to the fear of being seen.

The research survey and interviews have identified three types of harms caused by this irregular access to sanitation infrastructure:

• Gender-based violence and harassment experienced when going to a CTC or OD site – the greatest numbers of incidents of harassment and violence took place at OD sites (14 responses) followed by CTCs (nine responses). Nine women said they experienced some form of violence or harassment nearly every day.
• Psychosocial stresses – these relate to the fear, stress and shame that women suffer because of the harassment, teasing and intimidation they experience when going about their daily sanitation activities. Some examples of psychosocial stressors that came out of the study include-

1. Fear of being bitten by snakes, dogs and other animals in forest defecation sites in Kusumpur Pahari;
2. Fear of injury when defecating on slopes and hillsides, on roadside or in drains;
3. Fear of sexual assault or rape;
4. Stress of not being able to report incidences of harassment or violence due to bringing shame on themselves and their household, or facing revenge from perpetrators;
5. Stress of having to ‘control’ body functions.

• Economic impacts on individuals and households – economic harms are caused by a lack of adequate sanitation facilities in two ways: i) first, there is ‘lost’ time incurred in having to often walk for 10-20 minutes to reach a CTC, wait in a queue and then return home. Nearly half the participants in this survey who use a CTC said that it took 6 to 15 minutes to walk each way, while another 37 percent said they took 16 to 30 minutes to walk each way; ii) the second economic impact is the cost of fees for the use of a CTC. High user charges were given as a reason for not using a CTC by 23 per cent of participants, which means their only option was OD.

Who is responsible?

This research report therefore argues that ‘passive’ sanitation infrastructural violence occurs in cities such as Delhi because of two factors.

• The first is the lack of political will at all levels of the Indian state to take a systematic approach to the planning, implementation and maintenance of sanitation infrastructure. In the case of CTCs, the failure of urban local bodies and agencies to take responsibility for designing toilets that satisfy women’s biological and socio-cultural needs, along with a lack of regular cleaning, maintenance and water supply, frequently rendered them unfit for use.
• The second is the continuing lack of analysis of gender as a process (based on unequal power relations) in the policy, design and location of public and community toilets. Merely building more toilets to achieve targets set by governments will never solve urban India’s sanitation poverty if they continue to remain unused due to degradation and the lack of safety for women and girls.

Suggestions for future urban policy:

Based on the results, comments and suggestions collected by this research project, certain suggestions are made for addressing the harms and suffering experienced by women residents of informal settlements.

1. Local urban authorities must develop effective maintenance regimes for CTCs before building them and this includes providing a reliable water supply. Clean and well-maintained CTCs will encourage use and reduce OD prevalence;
2. Local women must be allowed to participate in the decision-making process about the design and location of new CTCs in their neighbourhood;
3. CTCs must be open 24 hours a day to prevent the continuation of OD practices;
4. There must be increased lighting along the roads and pathways leading to CTCs so as to improve safety for women and girls at night;
5. There is a need to consider having more than one caretaker per toilet block. This would help to reduce incidents of violence and harassment and could prevent the theft of taps and locks and other forms of vandalism at CTCs.

The full report can be accessed here.

Watch the full video (above) of the talk by Christian Schmid, where he presents results of a comparative study of urbanisation processes in eight large metropolitan territories across the world: Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong / Shenzhen / Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City, and Los Angeles.

In the last decades, urbanisation has become a planetary phenomenon. Urban areas expand and interweave, and novel forms of urbanisation emerge. In this process, new urban configurations are constantly evolving. Therefore, an adequate understanding of planetary urbanisation must derive its empirical and theoretical inspirations from the multitude of urban experiences across the various divides that shape our contemporary world.

The main goal of this project is to develop new conceptual categories for better understanding the patterns and pathways of planetary urbanisation.

Christian Schmid is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all the available videos of our previous workshops, here.

Based on extensive field work, CPR researchers Neelanjan Sircar, Bhanu Joshi, and Ashish Ranjan share insights on how the Trinamool Congress (TMC) fared when judged for its performance over the last 5 years against 34 years of Left rule. Through her charismatic leadership and by focusing heavily on infrastructural improvement, they analyse how Mamata Banerjee demonstrated the change she promised when she came to power in 2011.

Read the full analysis here.

Philippe Cullet, a senior visiting fellow at CPR, has been appointed as member of three government committees set up by the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation to draft water legislations for India.

The three committees include:

• Committee to Draft National Water Framework Law–set up in December, 2015, to draft a National Water Framework Law on the basis of the two existing drafts.
• Committee to Re-draft the Draft Model Bill for Conservation Protection and Regulation of Ground Water, 2011–set up in October, 2015, to re-draft the said Bill.
• Committee to Draft River Basin Management Bill–set up in December, 2015, to work further on the Draft River Basin Management Bill, 2012.

Cullet has been particularly involved in the drafting of the National Water Framework Law, and the re-drafting of the Model Bill for Conservation Protection and Regulation of Groundwater, 2011.

Watch the full video of the workshop (above), where Jayaraj Sundaresan examines the relationship between the epistemological categories of planning and participation based on his experience of land use planning politics in Bangalore.

Through the workshop, Sundaresan attempts to answer key questions surrounding participation in the planning process, such as: Does participation happen only during the making of key decisions that underlie ‘the plan’ or also in devising appropriate planning instruments? Should it also happen during the implementation and enforcement process? Should participants have a say in every planning application in their neighbourhood and beyond, including in devising the planning system and its governance?

The two-part question and answer session that followed can be accessed here: Part 1, Part 2

More details about the talk can be accessed at the dedicated event listing here.

By Prepcom3, the last of three preparatory meetings to debate the intent and content of UN Habitat’s ‘New Urban Agenda’, member States were expected to agree on a way forward to improve the quality of human life by focusing on cities. Negotiations in Surabaya were to conclude with an outcome document to be signed at the Habitat III conference planned at Quito, Ecuador, in October, 2016.

While the negotiations were unsuccessful in reaching a resolution, thus necessitating informal talks between now and October, discussions at Surabaya reflect global trends and ideas to find solutions to the problems of the urban millennium.

The reflections below share key takeaways from Prepcom3 in general, and from the Centre for Policy Research–Institut de recherche pour le développement (CPR-IRD) event on 26 July 2016, specifically.

Prepcom3: from ‘settlements’ to cities– deliberating estimates and definition

The shift in focus from improving human settlements (Istanbul Declaration of 1996) to viewing urbanisation as one of ‘the 21^st century’s most transformative trends’ appears to be premised on a belief that the world’s urban population will ‘nearly double’ by 2050. The base figure for this is, however, not clarified in the latest draft of the New Urban Agenda, released in July this year.

The earlier zero draft, which was released in May 2016, however, stated that by 2050, the proportion of people in the world living in urban areas ‘will reach nearly 70%’. This whittling down of the extent of urbanisation is a reflection of the concern expressed by member States and stakeholders over the legitimacy of urbanisation estimates.

Indeed, there are pressing concerns on how ‘urban’ is understood given the varying definitions used across the world, and it is unclear whether an emphasis on urban is the best approach to providing sustainable and adequate housing to underserved populations across the world who live in settlements with varying spatial and socio-economic characteristics.

CPR-IRD event on small cities and informal settlements: expanding the notion of the urban

While the thrust of the side and parallel events at Prepcom3 was on discussing solutions and strategies for equitable, sustainable and resilient urban development, the side event organised by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in partnership with Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) on 26 July sought to expand the current notions of what is urban beyond the metropolis to embrace informal settlements and small cities.

Arguing that informal settlements and small cities have similarities in terms of scale, precariousness and lack of basic infrastructure, the event sought to see the urban in fresh ways, moving beyond spaces defined in terms of the legality of tenure, inclusion in plan and stringent governance frameworks.

Using examples of problems related to the provision of basic services like water and sanitation, panellists—Valerie Clerc of IRD, Mukta Naik of CPR, Gopa Samanta of University of Burdwan, Khairul Islam of WaterAid Bangaldesh and Shanawez Hossain on BRAC University—sought to highlight technological advancements in non-sewer sanitation, the successful use of community-based processes to access potable water, and innovative governance models like slab-based water pricing as potential solutions, that could address context-specific urban problems.

The interactive session, attended by over 70 delegates, raised questions on the dovetailing of traditional planning tools with community-based systems of knowledge and implementation. A storified version of the live tweets from the panel and plenary session of the conference can be accessed here.

The return of ‘planning’: the dominant message

That many discussions at Prepcom3, including the CPR-IRD side event, debated the modalities of planning and its role in meeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was no coincidence. In a marked change of stance since the Istanbul Declaration, which had nearly no mention of planning, the centrality of planning as a tool to achieve sustainable urban development is evident in the current draft of the New Urban Agenda.

When Shipra Narang Suri, President ISOCARP, the global association of professional planners dramatically exclaimed, ‘planning is back!’ at a UN Habitat side event at Prepcom3, her tone reflected the struggles and the possibilities of this shift.

The good news is that notions of planning have expanded to address multiple scales–supranational, national, metropolitan, city, and neighbourhood. In fact, the UN Habitat has brought out International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning (IG-UTP), and is developing a comprehensive compendium of illustrative practices to guide national, regional and local governments.

The guidelines, currently available in 12 languages, contain case studies from across the world that demonstrate the successful use of a variety of planning processes that integrate elements of physical and strategic planning in achieving more compact, socially inclusive, better integrated and connected cities that are resilient to climate change.

For Indian cities, this necessitates a relook at planning components and implementation strategies, especially at municipal governance frameworks and capacities. When the journey from Surabaya to Delhi ends in a three-hour traffic jam caused by water logging and poor traffic management, the importance of dovetailing policy and planning with management capacities and implementation is brought home in a rather emphatic manner.

See video of India’s official statement at PrepCom3 and read the Habitat III National Report.

Despite the increasing popularity of participatory approaches in urban planning and design, the voices of children remain relatively unheard by professionals and citizens who contribute to shaping living environments. In India, children are simultaneously seen through the economic lens, as the future workforce, and through a rights-based lens that portrays children among the weak, vulnerable members of society – those without a voice and agency.

In this context, despite the recognition of the criticality of play in the development of children, planned or spontaneous interventions in creating conducive play spaces are rare in Indian cities and society sees play in opposition to ‘useful’ activities such as learning and working.

The world over, researchers and practitioners in an array of fields, including child psychology, education, landscape architecture, planning and design are collaborating to raise awareness and disseminate knowledge about appropriate play environments for children. Some of these global experiences are captured in How to Grow a Playspace, edited by Australian landscape architects Katherine Masiulanis and Elizabeth Cummins.

Mukta Naik’s chapter, titled Of Agency, Participation and Design: Two Contrasting Play Scenarios in Indian Cities in the book How to Grow a Playspace: Development and Design draws from two contrasting situations – a gated upper class neighbourhood and an informal settlement in Delhi – to highlight how children continue to be excluded from conversation about design and public space.

In the first scenario, parks become sites of contestation as they are appropriated by other older citizens who claim a superior form of citizenship and even resort to litigation to impose their idea of a neighbourhood park as a pristine and beautiful place of repose. That court judgements blame the situation on poor planning hardly remedies the situation for children, who must continue to rely on adults to support them in a country where conversations about a Right to Play are only emerging.

In the case of the informal settlement, a lack of demarcated play spaces or poor maintenance of these, results in the creative use of streets, courtyards and corridors especially at certain times of the day. Sadly, where experiments with participative design and planning have been conducted in India, children have likely articulated the concerns they overhear from adults, like the need for better infrastructure like street lighting, water supply or sanitation.

In conclusion, the chapter outlines the need for designers, planners and citizen activists to leverage child-led participatory approaches to design meaningful play spaces through strategic and creative interventions. By presenting these Indian cases in an international publication, the chapter seeks to highlight the complexity of spatial planning in the Global South and seek participatory rather than purely technical solutions for design issues.

The publisher page for the book featuring the chapter can be accessed here.

Electricity use in Indian homes – from lights, ceiling fans, televisions, refrigerators, among other appliances – has increased 50 times between today and 1971 (seen in Figure 1), even though India’s  per capita residential electricity consumption is less than a third of the world average. Residential electricity now outpaces growth in industrial, commercial and agriculture sectors. This striking statistic is on the increase, as India moves towards one of the largest urban transitions in history in the coming decades. What is the implication of this transition for household electricity use, as the urban population grows and income levels rise? What do we know about how electricity is currently used in homes across the country? And what drives our dramatically changing consumption patterns?

These questions form the basis of a new series on residential electricity consumption, jointly authored by the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi and the Prayas (Energy Group), Pune. In a weekly post for the next two months, CPR and Prayas will provide research findings on the nature of India’s residential electricity use. These findings draw from recently published work, and from new research that will be published in the next few months.

Specifically, the CPR findings are based on two new energy services surveys: 700 households in affordable housing units in Rajkot; and 5500 households representative of the National Capital Region or the broader Delhi area. The Prayas findings draw from two recent reports: a study to analyse the impacts of India’s large-scale LED bulb market transformation programme; and review of trends in India’s residential electricity consumption.

This series has two motivations:

• First, is the sheer scale of residential growth and the challenge of meeting this demand in a sustainable manner. India’s residences, which avail modern energy services such as cooling, clean cooking, lighting, and media access are predicted to account for 85% of the country’s floor space by 2050. The population’s development and lifestyle needs, coupled with the government’s aim to provide uninterrupted electricity to all homes by 2019, is projected to increase electricity consumption five to six times between 2014 and 2030. A combination of rapid electrification, increasing incomes, and technological development will result in people buying more appliances and using more electricity to run them. Already, the residential sector uses about 25% of the country’s total current electricity consumption (with a nine per cent growth in 2015-16) – at a time when less than a quarter of all households do not have an electricity connection and those that do face frequent power cuts.

Figure 1: Trend in Residential Electricity Consumption in India (1971-2015). Decimals are approximated to their closest whole numbers.
Source: Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MOSPI) & Central Electricity Authority (CEA) data

• The second motivation is that in spite of the scale of current and future residential electricity use, an understanding of household consumption patterns and their drivers is limited. There is scarce publicly available data on the issue – evidenced by Figure 2, which shows how different studies predict dramatically different scenarios for the extent to which residential electricity use will grow. This large variation stems from differing methods, base-years and assumptions, even in business-as-usual cases. Variations also exist between government estimates, as seen by the difference in projections from the 18^th and 19^th Electric Power Survey (of India’s Central Electricity Authority). This uncertainty in future demand estimates is a significant barrier to strategic energy and climate planning. Beyond quantitative data, we also lack an understanding of the social and political processes conditioning electricity consumption such as appliance purchasing decisions, success of efficiency policies, and electricity use and conservation behaviour. A rigorous understanding of residential consumption is essential for designing effective and credible energy efficiency programmes, optimising planning of power capacity addition, and to adequately adapt to changing business models and technologies.

Figure 2: Projections from various studies (Base case scenarios)

The scale of increased residential demand, the uncertainty in the extent to which it could increase, and the urban and demographic transitions underway make future electricity needs not only immense, but also potentially malleable. If unaddressed, this demand will put serious constraints on already stretched national resources, posing serious social, local environmental and climate change related burdens. But if considered strategically, the increased demand could be an opportunity – to lock-in an energy efficient and low-carbon development path. More so, demand-side interventions could substantially reduce the requirements of energy supply, bypass the structural inefficiencies and financial losses prevalent in electricity distribution, and shape path-dependent consumption trajectories.

But in order to do so, the first step is understanding in detail how electricity is used today and the services that households seek the most. This new series aims to shed light on this question.

In the next blog, we will look at the broad trends of residential electricity consumption across different states in India and also highlight the disparity of electricity consumption at the household level. The Prayas website can be accessed here.

We would be grateful for your feedback on this series and request you to answer this short 5-minute survey.

The authors of this piece are Radhika Khosla (CPR) and Aditya Chunekar (Prayas).

To subscribe to email updates on the series, click here.

Other posts in this series:

• Trends in India’s Residential Electricity Consumption
• India’s LED Lighting Story
• Illuminating Affordable Homes
• The Efficiency of Appliances
• Appliances used in Affordable Housing
• Electrifying the National Capital Region
• Exploring the different uses of household appliances
• Role of human behaviour in driving electricity use

On 8 June, 2017, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) directed chairpersons of 10 State Pollution Control Boards (SPCBs) to cease functioning. This order was issued in the context of an earlier judgment delivered by the NGT on 24 August, 2016 in Rajendra Singh Bhandari v State of Uttarakhand & Others highlighting a serious institutional problem that has received little attention over the years: the composition of the Boards, and the qualifications of persons appointed as chairpersons and member secretaries, has not been fully in compliance with the letter of the law.

Shibani Ghosh, environmental lawyer and Fellow at CPR, contextualises and unpacks both the August 2016 judgment and the recent order of the NGT in an interview below.

What was the original case before the National Green Tribunal with regard to State Pollution Control Boards?

State Pollution Control Boards (SPCBs) are constituted by State Governments under the provisions of the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1974 [Water Act] and the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act 1981 [Air Act], and are important actors in Indian environmental regulation. The case was filed before the National Green Tribunal on the ground that persons holding important posts in the Uttarakhand Environment Protection and Pollution Control Board did not possess the necessary qualifications as required in the two Acts. According to the applicant, appointees were often officers of the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) and Indian Forest Services (IFS) who held ex-officio posts and did not have the necessary knowledge and experience in the field of environment. Further, those appointed would often discharge their functions on a part-time basis, and many were transferred to a different posting before completing their term.

The crux of the case lies in the qualifications of persons eligible to be nominated as chairpersons and to be appointed member secretaries of SPCBs by the State Governments. The provisions state that the chairperson must have ‘special knowledge or practical experience in respect of matters relating to environmental protection’. In the case of the Water Act, there is an alternate eligibility criterion for the chairperson – a person with knowledge and experience in administering institutions dealing with matters relating to environmental protection could also be nominated.

With regard to member secretaries, both laws state that the person must possess ‘qualification, knowledge and experience of scientific, engineering or management aspects of pollution control’, and must be engaged on a full-time basis.

The laws do not elaborate further on the qualifications, and the rule-making powers to decide the terms and conditions of service of the chairpersons and the member secretaries lie with the respective State Governments.

Initially the matter pertained only to the State of Uttarakhand, but during the hearings concerns were raised about the (lack of) qualifications of persons heading other SPCBs as well. As a result, the Tribunal directed all states to become a party to the case, and the final judgment applies to all states and Union Territories.

What were the key features of the judgement passed by the National Green Tribunal in August 2016?

The key aspect of the August 2016 judgment is that the Tribunal provided guidance for how the terms ‘special knowledge’ and ‘practical experience’ in the context of the SPCB’s chairperson’s qualifications are to be understood, as they are not defined in the two laws. The Tribunal concluded-

“122 … the Special knowledge is where the information one acquires through learning which is exceptional, in greater quality and degree. It can be said to mean knowledge which is surpassing, distinguishing and exceptional in nature and is derived through rigorous study or research over a reasonable period of time, in the field of matters relating to environment.

Therefore, any person with knowledge which is ordinary or casual in respect of environmental matters will not qualify or become eligible in respect of appointment under consideration. Knowledge, qualified with the word special, has to be acquired through accepted and established norms of education i.e. an academic qualification in the field of environmental protection as recognized by university established by law.” (emphasis as in original)

The Tribunal specifically added that the candidate must have to her credit ‘either M.Sc. in Environmental Science/ Environmental Management or M.E./M. Tech. in Environmental Engineering or equivalent degree’.

On ‘practical experience’, the Tribunal held-

“This would mean that a person with a basic knowledge and understanding of environment and its protection, which he might have obtained in the form of a Degree in Science, would be eligible for appointment if he has had actual experience in environmental protection. … A person having practical experience in environmental protection and abatement of pollution, but without at least the basic knowledge and understanding of the environmental processes through degree in Science subjects, cannot be regarded as eligible for the said post. … That leads us to hold that a person having practical experience must have a degree with Botany/Zoology/Chemistry or an allied subject wherein basic knowledge about ecology and environment are a part of the curriculum.” 

With reference to the third eligibility criteria for the post of the chairperson under the Water Act – knowledge and experience in administering institutions dealing with environmental protection – the Tribunal stressed on the requirement of knowledge along with experience. It held that a person was not an eligible candidate just by virtue of administering an institution dealing with environmental protection – as that was mere experience, and not necessarily knowledge. The Tribunal did not exclude IAS and IFS officers from the pool of potential candidates, but held that candidates must have a degree in a science subject which relates to the environment.

For member secretaries, the Tribunal emphasised that the law specifically required full-time appointments and that the candidate must have a ‘Masters of Engineering, Technology, Environmental Engineering or allied Sciences where Pollution Control forms a component of the curriculum’.

The Tribunal directed the State Governments to examine the qualifications of the current chairpersons and member secretaries, and decide whether they are in accordance with the law and the interpretation provided in the judgment. It gave the states three months from the date of the judgment to complete this exercise.

Besides this specific direction, the Tribunal also issued guidelines to the State Governments to ensure that SPCBs function smoothly. Although these were termed as ‘guidelines’, they were worded prescriptively. Inter alia, the State Governments had to notify rules under the Water Act and Air Act specifying the qualifications for the posts of the chairperson and member secretary; posts of chairpersons and member secretaries are to be openly advertised to attract the best talent; chairpersons and member secretaries are to have a fixed term– not dependent on their tenure in the State Government, and they are to be allowed to complete their full tenure.

Why is the matter back in news now?

In its 24 August, 2016 judgment, the Tribunal had given all states three months to ensure that the appointments were in consonance with the law and the guidance provided in its judgment. Some states had filed appeals in the Supreme Court against the August 2016 judgment. But as the Supreme Court has not stayed the judgment, states are expected to comply with it. The Tribunal is currently considering whether the states have complied with its judgment or not.

In its order on 30 May 2017, the Tribunal noted that states had not taken effective actions to comply with its judgment. It issued a show cause notice to all chairpersons of SPCBs whose appointment was not in consonance with the judgment to justify as to why they should not be asked to cease functioning as Chairman of the respective Boards.

After receiving replies to its show cause notice from various states, in its last order (8 June, 2017), the Tribunal directed the chairpersons of the SPCBs of the states of Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Rajasthan, Telengana, Haryana, Maharashtra and Manipur to cease functioning, as their appointment, despite passage of sufficient time, did not comply with the Tribunal’s judgment. The government of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab were given some additional time. There was no observation with regard to other states. The case is now listed for further hearing 4 July, 2017.

What implications does the NGT’s judgement have for the Boards’ functioning?

The SPCBs as frontline environmental regulators play a very important in India’s environmental governance. As noted by the Tribunal in its 24 August, 2016 judgment, and again in its 8 June, 2017 order, the SPCBs’ duties are predominantly technical in nature. To be able to discharge these duties, whoever is at the helm of affairs must have the capability, of course with assistance from the rest of the Board and staff, to understand, and respond to, the huge array of issues faced by the SPCBs. If the Tribunal’s judgment with regard to appointments is followed in letter and spirit it can significantly improve the institutional capacity of the SPCBs.

It could be argued that the 10 SPCBs whose chairpersons are no longer permitted to perform their duties will not be able to function properly. While it is not a desirable state of affairs, it is unfortunately not unusual for pollution control boards to be without full-time chairpersons. For instance, the post of the chairperson of the Central Pollution Control Board lay vacant for four and half years.

While the Tribunal’s stand on the issue is welcome, it is important to keep in mind that there are other structural issues such as autonomy in day-to-day functioning, transparency in decision making, and accountability for (in)action and poor decision making which are critical to the effective functioning of the SPCBs and for improving environmental outcomes. But these are not at issue before the Tribunal in this case.

Read an earlier piece by Ghosh on Understanding the National Green Tribunal here.

As the country moves forward to sustain efforts undertaken through past water, sanitation, and housing programmes, while increasing focus on integrated water and sanitation through Jal Shakti and Jal Jeevan missions, this is an opportune time to deliberate on lessons learned from the field and engage with recent research findings. The goal of providing tap water for every household by 2024 will need a new thrust on wise water management practices, which would need to be supported by appropriate policies and incentives. Although there is recognition of the need to improve resource planning, service delivery, pollution abatement, and recycling, while expanding infrastructure for the unserved and underserved, critical questions around how this can be achieved in an integrated and sustained manner remain unanswered. While the principle of subsidiarity and decision-making at the lowest effective scale could hold the key, how can these principles be operationalised at a national scale?

In this context, the Scaling City Institutions for India: Sanitation (SCI-FI) initiative at CPR with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with UNICEF and WaterAid India, organised a day-and-a-half long national workshop titled ‘WASH Futures: Subsidiarity for Service Delivery’.

National Workshop and its thematic spread

The National Workshop served as a platform for discussions around some of SCI-FI’s key research themes and connect them to the new policy context in the sector in terms of governance and institutional roles.

The primary participants of the workshop were governments (at central, state and local levels), academicians, researchers, National Faecal Sludge and Sepatage Management (NFSSM) alliance members, policymakers, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), and other development partner agencies.

The inaugural session setting the agenda for the workshop was followed by deliberations on key thematic areas, which are identified as under:

Technical Session on integrating planning to address water and sanitation needs in the rural-urban continuum.

Continued reliance on groundwater sources, without adequate recharge and predominance of sporadically serviced on-site sanitation systems – septic tanks and pits – evidence the commensurateness of water and sanitation infrastructure and services in India. Notwithstanding these deprivations, urban growth in the country has been precipitous in the last two decades, triggering in-situ growth, peripheral outgrowth and growth of satellite settlements.

A study on the identification of large and dense villages (LDVs)  and their water sanitation facilities in India (which included 3892 Census Towns (CTs), settlements identified as urban by the Census of India but are administratively rural, and 155, 056 villages) revealed that they accounted for 507 million population based on Census 2011 data. It also revealed that a majority of these settlements are proximate to Class I cities which have a population greater than 100,000. More intriguingly, there is a continuum between these proximate rural and urban settlements not only in resembling socio-cultural and political economic structures but also through discernible similarities in water and sanitation infrastructure. LDVs which are within 25 km distance from nearby Class I cities account for 47 percent of the total LDV population of 507 million and 49 percent of their households with water within premise and 35 percent of households with toilets connected to on-site sanitation systems (Census 2011).

There has emerged a clear evidence of economic, social and environmental linkages between the urban areas and proximate settlements which stand to benefit from collective development planning. Another primary survey conducted in 2018 covering 60 LDVs in 5 states underscores trends in preferences for septic tanks and pits and variations in their design and make based on socio-economic, technical and behavioural factors influencing household decision making on their construction and maintenance. This study underscores and impels the exploration of rural-urban continuum through a microscopic analysis of water and sanitation infrastructure and services to gauge the viability of common waste treatment facilities through integrated planning and streamlining desludging services.

It is also imperative to facilitate the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals. Dovetailing efforts to converge pursuance of Goal 6 of Clean Water and Sanitation with Goal 10 on reduced inequality and Goal 11 on Sustainable Cities and Communities which call for ‘supporting positive economic, social and environmental links between urban, peri-urban and rural areas by strengthening national and regional development planning’. The case for integrated planning for urban-rural contiguous areas is further heightened by the government’s conviction to build faecal treatment plants and provide tap-water to all households by 2024. This session deliberated on cross-jurisdictional planning opportunities both within ‘mission’ plans and in wider governance arrangements within a subsidiarity framework.

Technical Session on decoding the sanitation mechanics.

The sanitation value chain emphasises on a systemic approach to address the prevalent challenges in the sanitation fold. This starts with the nature of the containment structures (on-site sanitation systems) and extends to the value of the recycled and reused products, emphasising on plethora of innovative technological interventions in the sanitation value chain. So far, the understanding of on-site containment structures, which are an essential part of the sanitation chain has been limited. A new nationally representative survey of OSS in secondary and smaller cities and in LDVs aims to address this gap in knowledge will be presented and debated.

Different forms of desludging services prevalent to the local context also serve an important role in the value chain as it holds cross cutting linkages with technical and social (reducing the human intervention in desludging) dimensions. Poor or limited FSSM in the current context are not fully mechanised and involve manual cleaning in one form or the other. Generating value out of the waste is a concept of resource efficient system, thus selection of sustainable FSSM systems for treating the sludge and valorisation of the treated waste into portable water and nutrient-rich biosolids or soil conditioners is to be viewed very critically in terms of attracting investments and minimising the environmental impacts.

This session gave a comprehensive insight on each component of the sanitation value chain, from the technical perspective of various subject experts with an enriched experience in this sector. Based on group discussions the session explored how the policy environment and intervention could be more supportive of alternative technologies and service delivery models, with the goal of increasing access to safe and sustainable water and sanitation in urban and rural areas.

Technical Session on Private Sector Participation to bridge the sanitation market gaps.

The sanitation sector presents an opportunity for a market of about $62 Billion by 2021. As per an earlier CPR-CII study, the Swachh Bharat Mission was expected to generate demand of Rs 32,000 Crores for the sanitary ware industry, Rs 27,900 Crores of demand for micro-finance, Rs 4,16,000 Crores for the equipment industry among other sectors[1]. Private sector engagement in the sanitation service sector remains unregulated and is characterised by indiscriminate disposal of the collected faecal sludge, precarious safety protocols, and unstandardised service provisions. There exist several key opportunities for engagement of the private sector ‘to leverage new business models and to enable efficiency and at competitive costs.’ As the scale of sanitation challenges is shifting from the issues of construction of toilets to the issues of sustained usage and continued O&M, cost recovery and driving innovative technological solutions, the role of the private sector will emerge in a broader light. This has also been articulated in the national policies encouraging Urban Local Bodies to invite private capital in urban infrastructure as well as to bring in private sector efficiency in the delivery of urban services, O&M and FSSM.

This session reflected and elucidated on the new studies that document the prevalent and emerging practices and business models underscoring private sector participation across the entire sanitation value chain. It also analysed the regulatory and governance frameworks present and envisaged for private sector led service provision. Group discussions deliberated on practices that can encourage partnerships, entrepreneurship, technology and financing in the water and sanitation sector.

Technical Session on Inclusive Sanitation: Rhetoric or Reality?

The sanitation ecosystem in its current form often misses critical elements of inclusion and equity in the value chain. Most city level sanitation chains do not adequately implement principles of inclusion, particularly in the city sanitation planning, technology selection, institutional reforms, financial mobilisation and managerial leadership. This impresses on the need for an ecosystem to mainstream inclusive sanitation processes in all urban management endeavors, while strengthening capacities of the institutions (public, private and community) to accord priority to inclusive sanitation.

This alignment of equity and inclusiveness in the city wide sanitation needs to be built across planning, designing, implementation, regulatory, monitoring and management levels. It also needs to include designing innovative technology options to increase and facilitate access, safety and security of women, aged, differently abled, transgender and other vulnerable groups in the public locations like school, work place, health centers, markets, parks, travel hubs and others. Tracking access and usage of equitable sanitation infrastructure and understanding the reasons for inequitable access and variability across the sanitation chain will gain enormous traction in the years to come. Provisioning of FSM services to poor and marginalised in cities, keeping in mind the principle of justice and equity, has already gained grounds in few cities. Safety and dignity of workers, capacity building and skill building of poor and marginalised to operate and manage sanitation (including FSM) systems require integration in city wide inclusive approaches.

This thematic session elucidated the need to align the concerns of city wide inclusive sanitation for one and all and the steps taken by the partners – government, CSOs, CSRs – to promote inclusive approaches in sanitation to facilitate access, ownership of FSM services in the city. The session also deliberated on various models adopted for encouraging inclusion and the challenges faced to embed and integrate inclusive sanitation in cities in a sustained manner and to draw recommendations for enabling policy frameworks on inclusion in sanitation.

Technical Session on Scale and Institutional Capacities

With the thrust on water and integrating sanitation with water programmes, emphasis on scale and institutional capacities of stakeholders is a key area for research and action. Under the new proposed subsidiarity principles in governance of the sector, capacity building of state level institutions as well as district and local government institutions (PRIs/ULBs) will be accorded priority.  Institutional landscape in both water and sanitation space across all levels are faced with capacities which are inadequate, fragmented and often conflicted. Both water and sanitation programmes are viewed in silos in terms of planning, designing and implementation, instead there is a need to see both sector integrated programmatically. There are other issues surmounting the institutional capacities, with different programmatic aspects dealt with overlapping roles and responsibilities. However, there is a need for compliance of principles of subsidiarity to guarantee independence to a lower authority in relation to a higher tiers of governance. This highlights the need for oversight or authority to monitor dovetailing of both water and sanitation programs and investments in integrated manner; resolve conflicting issues and taking necessary decisions.  As per the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, the functions of water and sanitation rests with local bodies but the question  remains whether these bodies are capacitated enough to manage the function, and whether funds and functionaries are present with the local bodies to play the role effectively.

This session presented an overview on the need of scale and institutional accountability requirements through capacity building assessment of state level institutions as well as local governance institutions and outline a road map for the bridging the capacities of the concerned stakeholders. It deliberated on seeing water and sanitation institutional framework in an integrated manner, with local level accorded priority.

Closing Plenary Session: Moving forward on recommendations and areas for action

This session with a mix of presentations and a panel discussion discussed the prospects of resource planning, service delivery, pollution abatement, and recycling through an integrated lens. Connecting with the discussions of all the technical sessions, the future of government initiatives in WASH and the key challenges towards sustaining efforts for the unserved and underserved was explored. It deliberated on what is understood to be gaps in knowledge given the broader consensus on the need to adopt principles of subsidiarity and decision making at the lowest effective scale. These issues were discussed from the perspectives of practitioners in government, development partners and researchers in the field.

ThePrint India was the digital partner for the workshop. Media coverage of the workshop can be accessed below:

• Decentralisation key to success of sanitation scheme, says Namami Gange chief Rajiv Mishra
• ‘No anganwadi centres built in 7 yrs because rural job plan was not interpreted correctly’