Giving wings to the elephant: Facilitating governance for urban sanitation in India

Access to reliable and sustainable sanitation services for solid and liquid waste disposal for 10 million poor Indians living in 50,000 urban slums and 640 towns in India, remains a problem. This is despite the International Year of Sanitation, liberal government funding through the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), promising community initiatives driven by NGOs such as SPAARC in Mumbai and Pune and WaterAid in Tiruchirapalli, as well as the Sulabh International private sector model.

The sheer size of the challenge and the obligation that government provide adequate sanitation services to its citizens, point to a government-led solution, through improved provision by urban local bodies (ULBs), public-private partnerships or greater involvement of civil society and its organizations. Not only has the state got the human and technical resources, the institutional set-up and the funds, it also has the mandate to provide these services to its citizens.

Although public utilities generally suffer from problems of corruption, inefficiency and low motivation levels, and operate like slow-moving elephants, some capable bureaucrats and committed politicians have brought in path-breaking change in several Indian cities. Some of these have used lessons from pilot programmes implemented by international agencies working through NGOs.

While these are definitely examples of making the walking elephant run, the task to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will require these elephants to fly. Scaling up these ‘islands of success’ to entire ULBs and cities, and sustaining these efforts, is the task at hand. This calls for creative governance, pooling the available resources of government and civil society, which in turn requires changes in the way bureaucrats, politicians and the rest of civil society work to create change. This paper uses instances of successful scaling up from demonstration pilots in sanitation and other sectors to suggest some of the changes required.