Improving Urban Sanitation: Key Strategies and Challenges

Walk through any Indian city at dawn and you will see two very different realities running side by side. Gleaming residential towers with modern plumbing stand next to settlements where a functional toilet is still a dream. Urban sanitation sits at the heart of this divide, and it is about far more than just toilets. It is a full cycle that runs from safe containment to treatment and reuse, and the way local governments manage this cycle shapes public health, water bodies, and the dignity of millions of residents.

What urban sanitation really means 🔗

In policy documents, sanitation is often narrowly read as access to a toilet. But in the urban context, the picture is much wider. The National Urban Sanitation Policy of 2008 frames sanitation as a value chain that covers the safe confinement, treatment, and disposal of human excreta along with hygiene practices. In simpler terms, sanitation begins when waste leaves the human body and ends only when it is safely treated and returned to the environment or reused.

For cities, two streams dominate this conversation: sewerage management (handling human excreta and wastewater) and solid waste management (handling garbage generated by households and businesses). When either stream breaks down, cities pay the price in polluted rivers, clogged drains, disease outbreaks, and reduced liveability.

Where urban sanitation stands today 🔗

The Census 2011 data remains a foundational reference point for understanding the sanitation landscape. According to it, about 13 per cent of urban households (nearly 10 million) practised open defecation, while another 3 per cent relied on unimproved sanitation arrangements such as unimproved pit latrines or direct flow into drains. Around 81 per cent of urban households had toilet facilities within the premises, but the gap of nearly 60 million urban residents without improved sanitation was striking.

The sewerage deficit 🔗

The bigger crack in the system lies further down the chain. India has around 4,700 cities, but only about 400 have sewerage networks. This means that even where toilets exist, the waste they generate often has nowhere reliable to go. On-site systems like septic tanks fill the gap, but many do not meet the Indian Standard 2470 code for installation and end up functioning as little more than holding containers.

The World Health Organization estimates that only around 58 per cent of domestic wastewater globally is safely treated, and the Indian average is considerably lower. As urban centres expand, sewerage systems struggle to keep pace, leaving populations vulnerable to outbreaks of diseases like typhoid, viral hepatitis, and cholera. These systems also create ideal environments for antimicrobial-resistant bacteria to emerge.

Solid waste: a parallel crisis 🔗

Alongside sewerage, solid waste management tells its own story of stress. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change estimates that only 75 to 80 per cent of municipal waste is collected, and just 22 to 28 per cent of what is collected is processed or treated. A significant portion of the rest ends up in open dumps, clogging drains and creating breeding grounds for rodents and disease vectors.

City-level data further highlights the inequality. A 2020 ICRIER study found Delhi had the lowest collection rate at 39 per cent while Ahmedabad led at 95 per cent. The country’s informal waste workers, often unrecognised and unprotected, gather thousands of tonnes of reusable material every day without basic safety gear.

Benchmarks for sewage management 🔗

To bring discipline to this messy picture, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has set service level benchmarks for urban sewerage. The three headline goals are aspirational but clear:

The first target is 100 per cent coverage of the urban population with sewerage or faecal sludge management services. The second is 100 per cent collection and treatment capacity so that every drop of wastewater a city generates can be safely handled. The third is reuse and recycling of treated wastewater, ideally covering at least 20 per cent of the treated output. These benchmarks acknowledge that building toilets is only the start. Without collection networks and treatment plants to match, the sanitation value chain remains incomplete.

Why treatment capacity matters 🔗

When treatment capacity lags, cities end up discharging untreated or partially treated sewage into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. This has cascading effects on drinking water quality, agriculture that depends on these water sources, and ecosystems. Even in major cities, only a small share of wastewater is captured by sewage systems, and an even smaller fraction is treated before disposal, leading to polluted sludge being released into water bodies with serious public health risks.

The ODF, ODF+, and ODF++ framework 🔗

To address both infrastructure and behaviour, the Swachh Bharat Mission – Urban (SBM-U) introduced a tiered certification system. Each stage builds on the previous one, moving cities from basic toilet access to a fully managed sanitation cycle.

ODF: the starting line 🔗

Open Defecation Free status is the first benchmark. A city is declared ODF when no person is found defecating in the open at any time, and every household or individual has access to a functional toilet, whether private, community, or public. SBM-U’s original goal was to achieve 100 per cent ODF status across urban local bodies by 2 October 2019. According to government dashboards, more than 4,234 cities have declared themselves open defecation-free under the Mission.

ODF+: focusing on operation and maintenance 🔗

Getting people to stop defecating in the open is only half the battle. If toilets fall into disrepair, people drift back to old habits. ODF+ focuses on toilets with water, maintenance, and hygiene, ensuring community and public toilets are clean, functional, and well-maintained throughout the day. It is the stage where sustainability takes centre stage.

ODF++: closing the sanitation loop 🔗

ODF++ is where the sanitation chain truly closes. The ODF++ protocol addresses the complete sanitation value chain, including safe and complete faecal sludge management. This means no untreated faecal sludge or sewage is discharged into open drains, water bodies, or land. It covers safe containment, emptying, conveyance, treatment, and disposal. Additionally, the Water Plus protocol announced in August 2019 aims to go further by ensuring treated wastewater is reused, aligning with Sustainable Development Goal 6 on clean water and sanitation.

Key challenges on the ground 🔗

Despite the policy architecture, urban sanitation faces persistent roadblocks that local governments must navigate every day.

Infrastructure lag and funding gaps 🔗

Building sewerage networks in dense, already-built cities involves massive cost and disruption. Retrofitting old parts of cities with underground drainage is especially tough. Since only a small share of Indian cities currently has sewerage networks, most cities remain dependent on on-site systems like septic tanks, which require their own careful management to prevent contamination.

The urban poor and slum sanitation 🔗

Sanitation inequality is particularly sharp in slum settlements. In notified slums, around 17 per cent of residents lack access to improved sanitation, and in non-notified slums, the figure rises to about 51 per cent. Tenure insecurity, shared toilet quality, and women’s safety at public facilities compound the challenge.

Behaviour change as the hidden engine 🔗

Infrastructure is only as effective as the habits that support it. Barriers to practising safe sanitation include inadequate funding, distrust in government programs, inadequate water supply, poor toilet maintenance, and historical discrimination based on caste, gender, and religion. Changing mindsets requires sustained communication, peer influence, and community participation, not just brick and mortar.

Climate pressure and new risks 🔗

Climate change is now reshaping the sanitation challenge. Increased flooding and droughts can limit access to safe sanitation facilities and reduce the water available for sewer systems, while certain wastewater treatment technologies contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Future-proofing sanitation means designing climate-resilient systems.

Strategies that are working 🔗

The picture is not all grim. Several Indian cities offer lessons in what effective urban sanitation looks like when institutions, technology, and citizens align.

Indore has become a reference point for solid waste management. The city implemented six categories of waste segregation, set up a control command centre to track garbage vehicles, ran campaigns to shift public attitudes, and deployed a large team of female sanitation workers with proper protective gear. The result is a city routinely ranked as India’s cleanest.

Small and medium towns are turning to faecal sludge management (FSM) as a practical alternative to waiting for full sewerage networks. Many towns have started deploying FSM systems to handle excreta contained in on-site facilities like pits and septic tanks, a more affordable and scalable approach. Alandur in Tamil Nadu is another often-cited example of how citizen participation in funding sewerage can accelerate coverage.

The move toward service outcomes rather than just infrastructure is also gaining ground. A recent joint World Bank-Asian Development Bank report urges cities to shift their focus from what they have built to how well those systems serve residents, emphasising professional institutions, reliable operation and maintenance, and performance-linked funding.

The road ahead for urban local bodies 🔗

Urban local bodies sit at the frontline of sanitation service delivery. Their job extends far beyond sweeping streets and collecting garbage. They must plan sanitation infrastructure in step with city growth, enforce building-level compliance with septic tank standards, manage solid waste end-to-end, and coordinate with state and central schemes. Strengthening municipal finances, investing in sanitation workers’ safety and dignity, and deploying technology for monitoring are all pieces of the same puzzle.

Ultimately, urban sanitation is where public administration becomes deeply personal. The quality of the air in a neighbourhood, the safety of a child walking to school, and the health of a river downstream all trace back to decisions made in municipal offices.

What do you think? If you had to pick one area for your city to fix first (expanding sewerage networks, improving solid waste segregation at source, or strengthening behaviour change campaigns), which would you choose and why? And how can urban local bodies balance the urgent need for new infrastructure with the equally important work of maintaining what already exists?

References

1. https://www.seejph.com/index.php/seejph/article/download/2711/1795/4005
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3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11276156/
4. https://www.orfonline.org/research/solid-waste-management-in-urban-india-imperatives-for-improvement
5. https://www.ifpri.org/blog/comprehensive-sanitation-in-india-despite-progress-an-unfinished-agenda/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swachh_Bharat_Mission
7. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/rural-water-and-sanitation/fast-track-work-on-odf-and-odf-parliamentary-panel-to-govt-69816
8. https://www.sbmurban.org/odf-protocols
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