Small and medium towns in India (100,000 in population) have nearly 40% of India’s urban population. While there are large gaps in sanitation across urban India, these gaps are more pronounced in the small and medium towns. This project supports one town in the Indian state of Maharashtra – Wai, to demonstrate a viable approach to provide citywide inclusive sanitation. Wai acts as a “laboratory” to test approaches that can be applied to other small and medium towns, as well as to underserved areas in larger towns in the state of Maharashtra and in other States in India.

The City-Wide Inclusive Sanitation (C-WIS) project for Wai monitors the quality of ODF+ service delivery, with special attention to urban poor and women, strengthen the city systems to ensure sustainability of these services beyond the project period and generate lessons that motivate and inform state actors to facilitate replication of Wai across the state.

Following are the activities that are being undertaken in this project:

Creating an enabling environment for FSSM in Wai Municipal council, under which CWAS provides support to Chief Officer, elected representatives and officials from sanitation department who have the responsibility of planning and monitoring of FSSM services. The support is to enable them to be accountable and to ensure that the FSSM services are safe and inclusive. This includes activities related identifying measures to ensure financial sustainability for FSSM services.

Support is provided to Wai council to move towards ODF++, to take up interventions such as: increasing individual toilet coverage, monitoring FSSM activities, reuse of treated wastewater /septage and reviewing their plan for grey-water management.

Activities are taken up with WMC to ensure that planning and delivery of sanitation services are inclusive. This is achieved by ensuring that sanitation services reach all communities, including the low-income settlements. Also interventions are taken up to ensure regular usage, replacement and monitoring of PPEs by sanitation workers. User centric and gender sensitive design of sanitation facilities and service/management approaches are being explored.

* A city is classified as ODF+ when not a single person is found defecating or urinating in the open and all community toilets and urinals are functional and well maintained.
** A city is classified as ODF++ when it has achieved ODF+ and its faecal sludge, septage and sewage is safely managed and treated with no discharging in open areas.

Filter / Tags

Capacity developmentCitiesCommunity sanitationPublic awareness, advocacy and civil society engagement Operation, maintenance and sustainable servicesBehaviour changeHealth and hygienePolitical processes and institutional aspectsGlobalToilets or urinals (user interface)Emptying and transport (non sewered)Treatment of wastewater or greywaterTreatment of faecal sludgeResource recovery Enabling environment and institutional strengtheningFaecal sludge treatment processesBill & Melinda Gates FoundationFaeces or faecal sludgeGreywater or wastewaterUrban (entire city)Urban informal settlements (slums)EducatorsJournalistsPoliticians and local decision makersPractitionersUniversity, education or research institution

Related Countries

India

Downloads