The Rashtriya Kishore Swasthya Karyakram (RKSK) is an adolescent health Programme within the ambit of the National Health Mission (NHM).
This study focusses on the expenditures and fund flows of RKSK in Sitapur district of Uttar Pradesh (UP). It uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis.
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This report chapter critically examines the Digital India mission, and its promises and perils. It focuses on the controversial issue of data governance and privacy norms, and the need for robust innovation policies for the mission to fulfil projected outcomes.
How to continue to fulfill the promise of the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana, now in its second phase, is an important policy discussion in the country. Three essential tasks remain: extend connections to the entire country, now requiring work among some of the most remote, poor, and disenfranchised groups; enhance usage among all users to complete the national household energy transition; and further extinguish fuel subsidies among the middle class to keep taxpayer costs from rising as efforts are enhanced to assist the poorest. The Collaborative Clean Air Policy Centre, in collaboration with the Centre for Policy Research, solicited suggestions as to what Ujjwala 2.0 might consider incorporating into its plans from nine major research groups that have been working on assessments of the current Ujjwala programme. This brief summarizes their suggestions.
Citation:
Harish, Santosh and Kirk R. Smith. 2019. “Ujjwala 2.0: From Access to Sustained Usage.” Collaborative Clean Air Centre Policy Brief (Series: Ujjwala 2.0). August 6.
As per the National Sample Survey 2018, nearly 60% of urban India relies on On-Site Sanitation (OSS) systems, like septic tanks and leaching pits, for the management of faecal waste. Augmentation of toilet access over the last five years under the Swachh Bharat Mission has only served to entrench this dependence, despite a push for centralized sewerage systems underwritten by schemes like AMRUT in Class I cities during the same period. Notwithstanding their scale and criticality to public health outcomes, OSS systems are poorly regulated and consequently ill-constructed in India. Therefore, it is vital to address the deficiencies in the downstream sanitation service chain beyond the toilet – beginning with the OSS system – to ensure that India meets its targets toward providing ‘Safely Managed Sanitation Services’ under the Sustainable Development Goal 6. The present study is a novel attempt to systematically analyse the state of OSS in urban India through a sample survey of 3000 households and more than 50 key informant-interviews across ten cities in four states. It shows that septic tanks, confused in common parlance and practice for a septic tank system, comprise the majority of all OSS systems at over 90%. However, in meeting household-level preferences, these systems exhibit variations along each of the principal design parameters, which cumulatively result in less than 2% of all surveyed septic tanks meeting the major requirements of the national governing standards. It finds OSS fraught with several compelling needs, including the inefficacy of septic tanks as primary treatment units, the lack of secondary treatment and safe disposal of pathogenic effluent, their delayed maintenance, and the lack of greywater management. In systematically identifying these issues, the report also recommends interventions in design, planning, and governance for safer and more sustainable on-site sanitation.
It is intriguing that despite a liberal economic narrative of borders as bridges, the transHimalayan trader has remained a rather forlorn and forgotten metaphor. This absence has however neither been voluntary nor anticipated but instead can be traced to fundamental flaws in India’s subregional discourse with its bias toward state-led formal institution building. Far from being marginal, the trans-Himalayan trader was in fact the central protagonist, as can be seen from a reading of the social and economic history of India’s borderlands. While this is not an attempt to read back into history a larger-than-life role for the border actor, it is a cue for India’s subregional discourse to imaginatively re-engage with the expertise and rich form of social capital that the transborder trader represents.
India’s transition from being a recipient of aid to a donor makes for a feel-good story. The policy brief questions this rose-tinted rhetoric and argues that there is an urgent need to map and systematise the diversity of India’s engagement as an actor in this evolving space. What sort of normative choices and tensions are these likely to present for Indian diplomacy? At the end of the day, many of these issues will be fundamentally linked to how India perceives its role in the region and the world at large and how it chooses to engage with questions of benefit sharing, trade-offs and the allocation of risks and burdens. Outlining its development priorities and bringing greater clarity to conceptualising what foreign aid with Indian characteristics constitutes should be the first order of business that India needs to attend to, if it wants to stay ahead of the (lending) curve.
Indian development cooperation has changed remarkably since its inception, shortly after its independence.The size and diversity of India’s development partnerships have grown, particularly over the past decade, nearly quadrupling in volume. Today, Indian development assistance is comparable to the foreign aid budgets of smaller, high-income European countries with one underlying difference: the Indian development cooperation budget is growing at a higher rate. With IDCR’s Spring 2014 report ‘The State of Indian Development Cooperation,’ we share our insights on India’s growing development assistance program.
Segregation in access to education in India had been escalating since the 1970s when a large number of private schools capitalized on the opportunity to provide separate schools for the middle class. This initial segregation was further perpetuated with a boom in the availability of low-fee private schools catering towards lower income families. With the shift of the Right to Education from a Directive Principle of State Policy to a Fundamental Right, came Section 12(1)(c) of the Act.
The clause imposes a legal obligation upon private unaided schools to reserve 25 percent of the seats in the entry-level class for children from Economically Weaker Section and disadvantaged categories. The intention behind this provision is to ensure that the states as well as other stakeholders in society share the obligation of realizing the right to free and compulsory elementary education. The increased prevalence of unaided private schools makes them a natural stakeholder to the fulfilment of this obligation. The mandate should also be understood as an effort to arrest the increasing segregation in Indian schooling and promote an environment of knowledge sharing between different sections of society to encourage the narrowing of current societal divisions. It has the potential to impact 1.6 crore children from EWS and DG categories in the next eight years.
However, the implementation of this provision faces numerous challenges. This report looks at Section 12(1)(c) from the administrative, legal, and financial perspective to highlight the challenges and to recommend suggestions for improvement.
The discourses on rural and urban spaces in India in the context of physical infrastructure have divulged their inherent characteristic differences. However, given the trends of urbanisation in India there has been a paradigm shift in rural – urban continuum manifested in, amongst many things, planning, production and provision of public and private infrastructure. This research explores the secondary data on sanitation infrastructure in large and dense villages in India from three census datasets. The analysis undertaken in the study attempts to comprehend the preference for improved on-site sanitation facilities in selected villages which were also found to be proximate to urban areas and national highways. The findings of the research highlight the statewise variations in large and dense villages which account for sizeable percentages of respective state population and depict a, generally, high preference for septic tanks and improved pits. The results of the study substantiate the need for a primary survey to instruct policy making adequately on the indispensability of decentralised strategies to improve the sanitation value chain.