Wastewater management predominantly takes the form of On-Site Sanitation (OSS) in low- and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs). In India, households construct and operate OSS systems in the absence of regulatory oversight and seldom in compliance with the national technical standards – posing a risk to water sources and public health. The present paper reviews novel evidence on the quality of these systems from a multi-state survey of 3000 households in India to identify policy and practice interventions for creating sustainable urban sanitation futures. The paper argues for local and national governments to unlock the potential of OSS as a safe and long-term wastewater management solution through (1) re-envisioning the system design to simultaneously meet household and environmental needs, (2) fostering prefabrication of systems as a means to distribute the compliance responsibility optimally, and (3) updating technical standards for facilitating such a paradigm shift.
The Journal Article is based on the study, Unearthed – Facts of On-Site Sanitation in Urban India, conducted by the Scaling City Institutions for India (SCI-FI) Initiative.
Brookings-NCAER India Policy Forum 2007
The Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement pose new conceptual challenges for energy decision makers by compelling them to consider the implications of their choices for development and climate mitigation objectives. This is a nontrivial exercise as it requires pragmatic consideration of the interconnections between energy systems and their social and environmental contexts and working with a plurality of actors and values. There are an increasing number of indices, frameworks and academic studies that capture these interconnections, yet policy makers have relatively few ex-ante tools to pragmatically aid decision-making. This paper, based on a collation of 167 studies, reviews how multi-criteria decision approaches (MCDA) are used in energy policy decisions to explicitly consider multiple social and environmental objectives, and the conceptual usefulness of doing so. First, MCDA can be used to distil a finite set of objectives from those of a large number of actors. This process is often political and objectives identified are aligned with vested interests or institutional incentives. Second, MCDA can be used to build evidence that is both qualitative and quantitative in nature to capture the implications of energy choices across economic, environmental, social and political metrics. Third, MCDA can be used to explore synergies and trade-offs between energy, social and environmental objectives, and in turn, make explicit the political implications of choices for actors. The studies reviewed in this paper demonstrate that the use of MCDA is so far mainly academic and for problems in the Global North. We argue for a mainstreaming of such a multi-criteria and deliberative approaches for energy policy decisions in developing countries where trade-offs between energy, development and climate mitigation are more contentious while recognizing the data, capacity and transparency requirements of the process.
Continuing the debate on direct cash transfers, the authors of the article “The Case for Direct Cash Transfers to the Poor” (12 April 2008) respond to Mihir Shah’s criticism (23 August 2008). The six points of contestation by Mihir Shah – including those on the public distribution system and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme – are refuted. The argument in essence is that seeing the problems with anti-poverty programmes as faulty design and limited availability of resources does not recognise the culture of immunity in public administration and the weak capabilities of local governments.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the political capital needed to push for a settlement of the boundary dispute with China. This could open up avenues to strengthen economic ties with China and also give India political space on multilateral stages like the World Trade Organization and the climate change negotiations.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has invested much political capital in his foreign policy initiatives. Behind the spectacle of the pomp and show, the real test of foreign policy and strategy lies in coherence of design, finesse in execution, and efficacy of outcomes. The first of our new column on Strategic Affairs takes a preliminary stab at assessing whether New Delhi has been able to translate its desires into tangible outcomes.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, secured a decisive mandate in India’s recently concluded seventeenth general election. With this victory, the BJP has firmly established itself as the dominant national political party, ushering in a new phase in Indian politics. How did the BJP achieve this, and what does the 2019 election teach us about the dynamics of India’s new dominant party? Analysts have identified money power, organizational strength, and right-wing populist politics as pillars of the BJP’s electoral success. An important but sometimes overlooked aspect of this populist politics is the BJP’s approach to welfare policy. Here, the BJP mixes left-wing populism in favor of the poor with right-wing cultural majoritarianism. Welfare programs—strategically deployed—are important instruments through which Modi has secured moral legitimacy and voter trust. In order to understand India’s new party system and the character of the hegemony that it tends to maintain, it is thus important to study the dynamics of welfare politics.
ALTHOUGH India’s political elite refuses to remember the legacy of the British Raj, Delhi’s security establishment can’t forget the essence of the nation’s regional policy established under colonial rule. Consider, for example, the reluctance of the Congress Party, which runs the state and central governments in Delhi, to mark, let alone celebrate, the founding of New Delhi as the capital of India a hundred years ago. Yet, India’s mandarins have been busy in 2011 negotiating new bilateral treaty arrangements with key neighbours. The new partnership agreements that India has signed with Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Maldives are perhaps the most significant achievement of Indian diplomacy in 2011. These agreements are indeed about modernization of the Raj legacy in the subcontinent. They mimic in some ways the kind of security arrangements that the Raj had constructed with British India’s smaller neighbours. They also differ significantly from the Raj framework. Delhi is adapting to the new circumstances and opportunities that it now must deal with in its immediate neighbourhood.
The general unwillingness of India to acknowledge the importance of the Raj legacy in foreign policy can’t all be put at the door of the political classes. The Indian National Congress may have enough reasons to perpetuate the myth that Indian foreign policy was divined by Jawaharlal Nehru when he took charge of the nation, first as the vice chairman of the Viceroy’s executive council in 1946 and then as prime minister on 15 August 1947. The BJP might have been critical of Nehru’s foreign policy, but never had the intellectual depth to put the evolution of modern India’s external engagement in a credible perspective of its own. The Left was too blinded by ideology to see the essential continuities in India’s foreign policy.
The failure on the part of the academia that studies Indian foreign policy for a living must take considerable blame for widespread misreading of the sources and tradition in India’s diplomacy. Driven largely by political science, the study of Indian foreign policy, at home and abroad, was dominated by an analysis of India’s idealist positions on international issues in the early years after independence. Few have bothered to assess the seamless connection between what Kolkata and New Delhi did in the region before independence, and what Nehru and his successors sought to achieve in India’s immediate and extended neighbourhood after 1947. Historians could have done much better, but only less than a handful in that profession have been interested in studying the pre-independence sources of Indian diplomacy.
The Groundwater (Sustainable Management) Bill, 2017 drafted by the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation provides a new template that states can use to adopt legislation capable of addressing the fast-increasing groundwater crisis faced by many states. This Bill follows on an earlier model bill drafted in 1970 and updated several times until 2005 on which the dozen of existing groundwater acts are based. This 1970 template is unsuited to the present needs of a country where groundwater is now the primary source of drinking water and irrigation. In particular, it fails to provide for local-level regulation of what is often known as the most local source of water and fails to provide for conservation measures at aquifer level. The 2017 Bill integrates legal developments having taking place since the 1970s, such as the decentralization reforms kick-started in the 1990s, the recognition of water as a fundamental right and its recognition as a public trust. In doing so, it provides new bases for regulating groundwater as a public resource and to take measures at aquifer level, something that is crucial to address ongoing overexploitation and falling water tables.
In the wake of the global enthusiasm for smart cities, the central government launched the ambitious Smart Cities Mission in 2015. Based on a detailed analysis of proposals of the top 60 cities, the mission is located within the larger urban reform process initiated in the 1990s. An attempt has been made to define smart cities to understand how they envisage questions of urban transformations, inclusion and democracy. The proposals reveal an excessive reliance on consultants, lack of effective participation, a common set of interventions that are accepted as “smart solutions,” and a shift towards greater control of urban local bodies by state governments.
