Policy Briefs & Reports

KEY FINDINGS By far the largest share of the DUSIB budget, a little over 63 percent, is spent relocating JJCs, including construction of flats under JNNURM. A range of actors inside and outside of DUSIB reflect an overwhelming perception of the agency and its predecessor as marginal and weak....

The jhuggi jhopri cluster (JJC) is one of seven types of ‘unplanned’ settlement designated by the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD). JJCs are located on “public land”—land owned by agencies like the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the Railways, or the Central Public Wor...

This brief makes an attempt to benchmark India’s performance globally, from India’s perspective. It compares the sanitation scenario in India with the MDG regional blocks and other comparator countries. The brief makes use of a set of global data sources to relate urban open defecation (%) with o...

1. An analysis of Karnataka’s Action Plan on Climate Change

While the government has created a long, complex, and cumbersome process for regularisation, it has resulted in little. By any reasonable definition of regularisation, residents should receive improved infrastructure and more stable land tenure as a result of the process. Here’s what happened in ...

14 April 2014 The process of slum eviction and rehabilitation in Delhi continues to be plagued by serious governance challenges. We identify two broad problems. First, despite the designation of a nodal agency, slum rehabilitation suffers from a lack of coordination, with various government agen...

India’s capital is marked by diferent 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 diferen...

The unauthorised colony (UAC) is one of the seven types of ‘unplanned’ settlement designated by the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi (GNCTD). UACs are residential settlements built in contravention of zoning regulations, developed either in violation of Delhi’s master plans or on...

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 t...

Is a case study from a temple town (Puri) in the east coast of India. This case study begins with how this small city famous for temple based tourism, first came to set up a waste water treatment system and then goes onto illustrate how the underground sewerage project currently under constructio...

This brief describes how the Satara Nagar Palika (Municipality) a medium sized town in the state of Maharasthra, manages to provide basic urban services like water, solid waste and faecal waste management. The note profiles their planning and management practices and provides a valuable snapshot ...

The WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program (JMP) data for 2011 shows that Indonesia comes second after India in number of people without access to toilets. In urban areas 13.9% of the population in India practice open defecation, while the number is 13.1% for Indonesia. This policy note explores how...

This is a policy discussion note, which examines how coordinated and widespread have the different initiatives to improve urban sanitation been across cities and states and what possible steps may be taken by the Government of India to actively support the National Urban Sanitation Policy. The no...

The roundtable was jointly organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Centre for Policy Research on the side-lines of the BMGF’s Reinvent the Toilet Fare. The roundtable brought together senior policy makers, city and state level implementers, technocrats and sector experts to bra...

The finance minister presented the interim budget in the parliament on 17th February, 2014. The full budget will be presented in June-July after the general election. The Finance minister ostensibly kept his promise and remained on the path of fiscal consolidation. The revised estimate for the FY...

A growing international engagement by border states today has the scope to frame the terms of India’s evolving engagement with its subregional neighbourhood. These hold the potential to recognise the local actor as a critical stakeholder on a range of transborder issues such as trade, energy, env...

State Action Plans on Climate Change (SAPCC) hold potential as an important intervention in the development process. They provide an institutional platform to mainstream concerns of environmental sustainability into development planning and, if done properly, to update ideas of sustainability to ...

In 2014, the Government of India launched the Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U) to resolve India’s sanitation bottlenecks and accelerate the development of sanitation markets. Targeting the elimination of open defecation through universal toilet access, over 5.5 million urban toilets have been ...