India

This India Country Paper on Enhanced Quality of Life through Sustained Sanitation was prepared for South Asia Conference on Sanitation (SACOSAN) IV held at Colombo, Sri Lanka in April, 2011.

In rural sanitation, India’s flagship rural sanitation programme, the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), continues to be implemented with renewed vigour, and improvements in multiple facets of the programme. The TSC programme was given a further boost with the introduction of the Nirmal Gram Puraskar (NGP), an innovative incentive scheme for Gram Panchayats, Blocks and Districts. The rural sanitation sector has continued to receive increasing budgetary support.

In 2000, in response to a Supreme Court order, the Government of India formulated and enacted the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules (hereafter referred to as the Rules) to mitigate a burgeoning solid waste crisis. Pollution from haphazard municipal solid waste disposal was gravely jeopardizing public health, thereby undermining the nation’s development gains.

The Rules’ prime objective was to protect public health and the environment by minimizing disposal of waste in landfills, thereby aligning the government’s municipal waste management policy with its commitments to international treaties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, control the production of persistent organic pollutants, conserve finite resources, and achieve broad development targets.

This is the seventh book by CAB International in the series on Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management.

This report is a part of a series of papers that analysed the baseline data from all countries where the program was implemented.

It documents the approaches in a context where the state government agencies responsible for construction and management of rural water supply systems have been found to be facing limitations in O&M arrangements.

The traditional approach to provision of rural water supply in India has been supply driven, with emphasis on norms and targets and on construction and creation of assets, but with very little concern for sustainable arrangements for better management and maintenance of the facilities built. The viewpoint that users are ‘beneficiaries’ rather than empowered stakeholders among the service providers has led to alienation of the users.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-HABITAT, is the United Nations agency for human settlements. It is mandated by the UN General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all.

The purpose of the survey is to reflect on the experiences of professionals, researchers, policy managers and farmers on dissemination and sustainability of SRI practices and principles. This survey seeks to build on the experience of SRI professionals to look at the future role of SRI on household food security and poverty reduction, the institutional framework to expand SRI. In addition, the extent to which soil health, water stress, adoption/dis-adoption and capacity building issues have been accommodated within SRI policy will also be explored.