In Delhi, as in many other Indian cities, millions of men, women and children who live in slums and informal settlements haveto daily confront the lack of adequate sanitation facilities. These sanitation inequalities have a greater impact on the health and socioeconomic status of women and girls because of their greater social vulnerability to sexual violence; there is also the role played by biology in their need for privacy, safety and cleanliness. Men and boys, on the other hand, tend to use public urinals and open defecation (OD) sites generally more frequently, because their need for privacy during these sanitation activities is not such a cause for concern. In addition, women and girls are forced every day to risk using precarious spaces for their sanitation activities that may expose them to gender-based violence and harassment and not satisfy their biological and socio-cultural needs. These urban sanitation inequalities also negatively impact the time women have available for paid employment as well as their daily domestic responsibilities, as they have to spend each morning queuing for toilets or getting up earlier to go with other women to OD sites. For adolescent girls this can often mean being late for school, which threatens their education and future life choices.
India failed to meet Millennium Development Goal No. 7 (adopted by the United Nations in 2000) relating to halving the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation. In terms of toilet usage across India, the Census 2011 found that 81 percent of urban households had a private toilet or latrine. But when it came to slum households, only 66 percent had a toilet, meaning that 34 percent had to either use a community or public toilet or resort to OD (Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation & National Buildings Organisations 2013, p. 60). In reality, there are an estimated 41 million urban dwellers still practising OD because of a lack of access to improved sanitation (WaterAid 2016). OD is a compulsion, not a choice, and creates particular risks and imposes a variety of harms upon women and children that men and boys do not suffer.
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 harms 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. Mangolpuri is a resettlement colony in the northwest region of Delhi with an estimated population of more than 350,000. It is interspersed with eight JJCs clusters of varying sizes. Kusumpur Pahari is located in the heart of south Delhi, near Jawaharlal Nehru University, and now has five blocks of JJCs and an estimated population of nearly 50,000.
India’s capital is marked by different settlement types, defined by diverse degrees of formality, legality, and tenure. As part of a larger project on urban transformation in India, Cities of Delhi seeks to carefully document the degree to which access to basic services varies across these different types of settlement, and to better understand the nature of that variation. Undertaken by a team of researchers at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi, the project aims to examine how the residents of the city interact with their elected representatives, state agencies, and other agents in securing public services.
Through three sets of reports, the project provides a comprehensive picture of how the city is governed, and especially how this impacts the poor. The first is a set of carefully selected case studies of slums, known as jhuggi jhopri clusters (JJCs) in Delhi, unauthorised colonies, and resettlement colonies. The second set of studies, of which this is one, explores a range of different processes through which the governing institutions of Delhi engage with residents. The third focuses on selected agencies of governance in Delhi. All reports are made public as they are completed.
Cities of Delhi is directed by Patrick Heller and Partha Mukhopadhyay and coordinated by Shahana Sheikh and Subhadra Banda. The project has received funding from Brown University and the Indian Council for Social Science Research.
This report provides concise exposition of the Malaysian urban wastewater management under the country’s existing primary federal environmental legislation. The report gathers essential information from different authorities that can be of use by policy-makers in the efforts of improving the existing situation of sewerage management problem in the country.
This report has been funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), as part of its Sustainable Development Investment Portfolio (SDIP), being implemented by The Asia Foundation and it’s partners. The goal of the SDIP program is “to increase water, food and energy security in South Asia to support climate resilient livelihoods and economic growth, benefiting the poor and vulnerable, particularly women and girls.” This research report investigates Indo-Nepal Water Treaties within the larger geopolitical and functional map of the India-Nepal relationship and South Asian dynamics. It constructs a historical narrative investigating the larger political, ideological and bureaucratic underpinnings which animated India-Nepal water relations and gave momentum to certain joint projects. Specifically, the project asks two interconnected questions – what were the larger political, economic and ideological factors which led to the particular outcomes in India-Nepal water relations and how those outcomes, in turn, affected the larger political, economic and ideological concerns in both countries. This paper focusses on cooperative hydrological projects between India and Nepal, which are designed to benefit both sides. Its scope does not include aid projects built with Indian assistance.
Integrated Child Development Services is Government of India’s (GoI’s) flagship programme aimed at providing basic education, health, and nutrition services for early childhood development. It has now been combined with POSHAN Abhiyaan to form Saksham Anganwadi and
POSHAN 2.0.
Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, this brief uses government data to analyse:
Required funds, allocations, and releases;
Changes in coverage and service delivery due to the COVID-19 pandemic;
Human resources; and
Malnutrition status
India for long has been a provider of economic support as well as capacity building assistance to Maldives. It has also acted as a security provider to the island nation with one prominent instance being the coup in 1988. Even till recently in 2012, India was at the forefront when it came to providing support to the democratically elected Mohammad Nasheed during the soft coup in 2012. A stronger bilateral relationship with Maldives is also significant for India to maintain as well as strengthen its leverage over the Indian Ocean Rim states so as to counterbalance the growing Chinese influence in the region and play a much more substantive role in the 21st century global economy. Thus, keeping these factors into consideration, in this brief we have tried to analyze India-Maldives bilateral ties in detail highlighting India’s growing development partnership, disaster relief support, security cooperation and trade with Maldives as well as looking into Maldives’ geostrategic significance in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).
India has strengthened its ties with Afghanistan since 2001. A crucial facet of the Indo-Afghan bilateral relationship has been India’s extensive initiatives directed towards the restructuring and rehabilitation of war-torn Afghanistan. Indian development support continues to play a pivotal role in Afghanistan’s overall socio-economic development through infrastructural, institutional, as well as human resource capacity building. This brief sheds light on India’s development assistance program to Afghanistan, which is the 5th largest bilateral aid program to Afghanistan and the largest program from any country in the region. The report includes a case study of the recently inaugurated ‘Afghan-India Friendship Dam’, as well as lessons from this case study on the delivery of Indian development cooperation projects.
The subregional turn in Indian diplomacy marks an interesting discursive shift in Indian foreign policy and its engagement of the Asian neighbourhood. Delhi’s ‘new’ reading of borders is an admittedly feel-good narrative of rethinking borders as bridges and speaks a comfortable cosmopolitan language. But behind this celebratory rhetoric, the subregional moment in Indian IR has been a bittersweet one- caught between colliding dualisms that have today resulted in a conflicted and confused narrative. While it speaks of a liberal vision of globalism it has at the same time been curiously resistant to step away from the reductionist logic of borders as barriers. The paper engages with this puzzle and the severe distortions it has produced in India’s eastern borderlands. The paper argues for the need to look at subterranean processes that are subverting the idea of borders as territorial dividers and bringing together a new set of actors with an interest and stake in deepening subregional integration. These dynamic processes constitute, what the paper calls, subterranean subregionalism(s), a form of integration that mainstream research and policy has so far chosen to ignore.
The Pacific Islands, a group of fourteen island nations in the South Pacific Ocean had been a source of low interest for the global powers, however, this seems to have changed as Asia draws increasing attention from the world economies in the 21st century. Despite geographical distance and unenthusiastic historical interaction, initiation of India’s development engagement with these island nations date back to as early as the year 1973. Importantly, over the past decade, India has been further successful in reinvigorating development ties with all the fourteen island nations. The strengthening of this relationship holds huge potential both for India and all the fourteen island nations, as it provides newer markets for India exports and more favorable terms of access to potentially resource rich Exclusive Economic Zones of the Pacific Islands. On the other hand, Pacific Islands stand to benefit immensely from India’s experience in diverse fields including low cost renewable energy as well as greater flexibility in their foreign policy choices. Thus, in light of these considerations, this paper looks into India’s development cooperation with the Pacific Islands by segregating it into various sectors of interest.
