ABSTRACT
Sanitation issues have received one of the lowest policy priorities in India. However, in the last two decades, with the debates on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they have received some attention and reasonable funding, with flagship programmes like the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan being launched. However, the conventional approach of centralized management remains the dominant choice for wastewater management, in spite of its limitations. The National Urban Sanitation Policy 2008 made some radical departures. This study analyses the state of urban sanitation to understand the practice of the implementation of the policy through an analysis of city sanitation plans, the main instruments for realizing the alternative conception of technology and institutional arrangements to make sanitation inclusive. Ignoring policy recommendations on contextual appropriateness of technology options, cities chose to follow the centralized imagination of service provision, which greatly limited the decision-making powers of urban local bodies to plan sanitation interventions in accordance with their capacity and demands, leading to concentration of infrastructure in bigger cities and side-lining of the concerns of smaller cities and poorer households in urban India.
