PI: Prof. Subodh Wagle, Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA)

Co-PI: Prof. Pradip Kalbar, Centre for Urban Science & Engineering (CUSE) and Prof. Pramod Khambete, IDC School of Design

Only a small percentage of the migrant workers and poor communities staying in shanty colonies have formal access to water services, despite an order of the Mumbai High Court and a policy to this effect by Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. Most members of these sections obtain water from private vendors who are completely unregulated. As a result, this water supply is inadequate, irregular, very expensive, and highly unsafe. For sanitation services, most of this population relies on paid service offered through community sanitation blocks operated by some government agencies or NGOs. Most of these sanitation locks are in a state of disrepair, leading to not just unsafe but inhuman conditions in which these services are delivered. There are some efforts for self-provisioning by building ramshackle toilets. This results not only in wide-scale spread of urinary and other infections mainly among the women, but also has serious implications for the public health in the city. At some locations, these facilities are in such disrepair that there have been accidental deaths, when the concrete slabs of the toilets have caved in.

The solutions will include rough/ schematic designs of facilities for providing water and sanitation services as well as facilities involved in on-site wastewater treatment, fecal sludge management, and medical waste management (for menstrual health facilities). The rough/ schematic designs will not include only technological designs but also designs of the institutional or management arrangements. The focus will be to evolve a set of solutions that will make an integrated combination of technological element (with inputs from design theories), community management, local entrepreneurship, and participatory governance. The main challenge here is to transcend the limitations imposed on the present solutions by conventional technologies and managerial approaches as well as by current policies, institutional structures, and governance arrangements.