The 20-year sanitation partnership of Mumbai and the Indian Alliance. Environment & Urbanization, Feb 2015.
Author: Sheela Patel, The Sparc Team. e-mail: sparcssns@gmail.com
Mumbai is well-known for the scale of the community toilet programme supported by local government, much of it undertaken in partnership with community-based organizations, including the National Slum Dwellers Federation, Mahila Milan (a federation of women’s savings groups) and SPARC (a local NGO), together known as the Alliance.
After describing how this community toilet programme developed over the last 20 years and sought city-wide scale, this paper focuses on the Alliance’s co-development with the municipal corporation of a system to monitor conditions in the hundreds of community toilet blocks built. This monitoring system supports government officials in each ward and the communities served by the toilet blocks in identifying and addressing faults. It also helps develop good working relationships between communities and ward and municipal officials, which can allow other key issues to be addressed.
