Wastewater management predominantly takes the form of On-Site Sanitation (OSS) in low- and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs). In India, households construct and operate OSS systems in the absence of regulatory oversight and seldom in compliance with the national technical standards – posing a risk to water sources and public health. The present paper reviews novel evidence on the quality of these systems from a multi-state survey of 3000 households in India to identify policy and practice interventions for creating sustainable urban sanitation futures. The paper argues for local and national governments to unlock the potential of OSS as a safe and long-term wastewater management solution through (1) re-envisioning the system design to simultaneously meet household and environmental needs, (2) fostering prefabrication of systems as a means to distribute the compliance responsibility optimally, and (3) updating technical standards for facilitating such a paradigm shift.

The challenge of ensuring clean water and safely managed sanitation towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goal 6 is made more complex by unplanned urbanisation in South Asia. Nearly 50% of all toilet-owning households globally and 83% in South Asia depend on non-networked sanitation, with a multi-step service chain comprising containment, collection, conveyance, and treatment of faecal waste. Over the last few years, South Asian governments have begun to eschew the long-enduring preference for centralised sewerage infrastructure in favour of better management of non-networked sanitation as part of city-level wastewater management systems. However, these interventions have largely excluded the household-level containment systems that hold the potential to create both adverse localised and diffuse public health and environmental outcomes if dysfunctional. The present Chapter discusses evidence from a multi-state household survey in India to assess the nature and quality of containment systems in use by urban Indian households. Secondly, it reviews approaches to their governance under more evolved paradigms to inform an ecosystem-wide strategy for managing these systems in India and countries with similar contexts.

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Meeting the sanitation needs of a growing and urbanizing population in India led the incumbent national government to launch a large-scale sanitation programme, the Swachh Bharat Mission in 2014. Having reduced the deficit in basic rural sanitation in its first phase, the programme is targeting to achieve universal safely managed sanitation in its second phase launched in February 2020. Since the trajectory to achieving safely managed sanitation is inherently path-dependent, the present article utilizes novel survey data from rural India to understand the nature of sanitation systems in transitioning spaces and identify the investments they require to provide safely managed sanitation. It finds that the de facto preference in sanitation systems that households manifest is in direct contrast to the governmental choice of the low-cost twin pit system. The choice of the on-site sanitation system is informed by the household’s economic status and how ‘characteristically’ urban the settlements they reside in are. The article further discusses the implications of these findings for the short-term responsiveness and long-term effectiveness of the massive sanitation investments (USD 19 billion) planned for the next five years in India.

Summary: Many participatory tools and methods have focused on rural development but few have considered aspects of settlement in rural areas. This paper explores a number of such tools designed for Indian professionals working in the field of housing. The author first discusses a number of elements related to the effective participation of local residents and then describes the tools themselves.