Social innovation in urban sanitation in India: Meeting unmet needs

Urban India continues to face the sanitation challenge and governmental efforts have contributed greatly to improving sanitation in the country. However, various non-governmental institutions have also experimented with innovative ideas in different regional contexts to meet the needs of the community and to ensure access to safe sanitation.

The book analyses case studies of effective sanitation programmes as well as experiments done with innovative ideas in different regional contexts by civil society organisations (CSOs) to ensure access to safe sanitation among the urban poor. It highlights the challenges and the importance of community participation for behaviour change, of increasing institutional capacities of municipalities and standardising and scaling up strategies which work. The authors highlight the need for designing low cost solutions, organising informal sanitation workers, serving marginalised communities and building effective alliances between communities and institutions to influence public policy.

The role of the community in finding technical solutions to sanitation has been rarely discussed in literature argues the book and addresses this critical gap by highlighting how innovative solutions are being created and adopted within different sociocultural contexts by drawing on multiple case studies across India, and for the need to scale them up and inform policy making.

The book has eight chapters:

Chapter 1: Urban sanitation landscape in India: Setting the context

This chapter reviews the evolution of urban sanitation and sanitation policies in India and analyses the recent state
of urban sanitation in India. The chapter covers important milestones influencing and impacting sanitation in India since the 1980s and the role of global water and sanitation-focused development institutions, from the start of the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade (IDWSSD).

The chapter also focuses on water and sanitation projects driven by CSOs and public programmes initiated by governments in search of new innovative approaches and technologies for scaling up sanitation and recent innovations around models for city-wide faecal sludge management systems. 

Chapter 2: Social innovation in urban sanitation: Experiences from India

This chapter examines the conceptual frameworks behind social innovations from the 1990s and analyses the changes being made in the context of Indian urban sanitation by drawing on examples from all parts of the country where experiments and interventions made in urban sanitation have placed households and communities at the heart of such changes.

Community based innovations in urban sanitation undertaken by civil society organisations (CSOs) like the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence (CURE), Consortium for DEWATS Dissemination (CDD), Development Alternatives (DA), Gramalaya, Nidan, Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA) and Urban Management Centre (UMC) are examined in the chapter.

Chapter 3: Organisation building for inclusive urban sanitation: Organising the unorganised

Collective efforts by the poor and marginalised communities to access basic services such as sanitation can be a powerful strategy to ensure access to sanitation for all. This chapter focuses on the importance of collective efforts by poor and marginalised communities to meet their sanitation needs.

The chapter demonstrates how social innovation in urban sanitation has embraced the idea of organisation building for the urban poor, especially to address the social inequality in accessing urban sanitation services, including the lack of safety and dignity for sanitation workers.

Chapter 4: Sustainable behaviour change in the community

This chapter deals with social innovations adopted in development of communication strategies for urban sanitation. It explores various innovations facilitated by civil society organisations (CSOs) in the urban sanitation space to encourage behaviour change in communities and other stakeholders.

This chapter traces the meaning and evolution of development communication, the approaches and methods used in development communication and its adoption in the urban sanitation ecosystem. These include the participatory intuitive- interpersonal communication approaches; The dialogical processes combined with mass and mid-media campaigns: community groups as influencers processes; Immersion and formative research to design and implement mass media campaigns rooted in cultural contexts adopted by organisations. 

Chapter 5: Sanitation work and workers prioritising issues of rights, dignity and safety

This chapter highlights the work of civil society innovations that have played an important role in raising public awareness around sanitation, helped sanitation workers access to dignity and rights and reduced the drudgery of their work.

The chapter traces the evolution of laws, policies and programmes that have made efforts at improving the working conditions of sanitation workers, particularly manual scavengers, while pointing to the problem of their poor implementation and the lack of accountability displayed by public institutions.

Chapter 6: Innovative technology in urban sanitation: Connecting the disconnect

This chapter explores how technical innovations led by civil society organisations (CSOs) are shaping  mainstream responses to urban sanitation. It presents examples of how appropriate technologies developed and piloted by CSOs are addressing sanitation challenges in urban areas through cost-effective, context-specific, affordable and  environment-friendly solutions in India.

The chapter underlines the relevance of unpacking and understanding technological solutions as social and environmental good in meeting the unmet sanitation needs of the urban poor.

Chapter 7: Multistakeholder capacity building for inclusive urban sanitation

This chapter describes three levels of capacity building: (i) Individual: Leadership and human resources; (ii) Institutional: Organisational strategy, structure, technology, processes and culture and (iii) Sectoral: Enabling laws, policies and the external environment.

The chapter examines innovative practices of multiple stakeholders on capacity building in urban sanitation with a special focus on capacity building of urban local bodies (ULBs).

Chapter 8: Urban sanitation: Policy research and advocacy

This chapter dwells on the role of policy research, outreach and advocacy in strengthening and scaling up social innovations to address the unmet need of urban sanitation in India. The chapter presents various cases of research that have produced new knowledge and the key efforts and approaches used by civil society organisations (CSOs) involved in social innovations to develop solutions.

The chapter discusses the key efforts of CSOs and summarises how these different approaches, coalitions and networks not only remain relevant, but also influence policies to meet the goals of urban sanitation in India.

Conclusion

The chapter argues that a look at sanitation programmes and policies implemented in India over time shows that rural sanitation has received greater attention from policy makers from independence up until the middle of 2000. A slew of programmes and schemes were targeted at villagers to build and use toilets since the 1980s.

Other than civil society organisations, social innovations have been been driven by the government, social entrepreneurs, for-profit organisations and academia as well. However, for social innovations to be scalable, they should be based on principles of economic, environmental and social justice.

This is an open access book available at www.taylorfrancis .com, made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.