National Sanitation Policy 2008

In continuation of the discussion in today's class on Urban Infrastructure, I wish to mention the National Sanitation Policy 2008.

The GoI announced the National Urban Sanitation Policy 2008 with the vision that “all Indian cities and towns become totally sanitized, healthy and liveable and ensure and sustain good public health and environmental outcomes for all their citizens with a special focus on hygienic and affordable sanitation facilities for the urban poor and women".

The institutional arrangements encourages the local urban bodies to come up with a City Sanitation Plan involving the multiple stakeholders of the city. The policy also envisages constitution of a City Sanitation Task Force, headed by the Mayor (does one exist?? :P) involving the key stakeholders including representatives from the civil societies. In addition, the policy also announced a National Award Scheme for Sanitation for Indian Cities with a proposed methodology on the rating and categorization of cities on 100 points scale based on their performance.

You can find a nice summary of the policy here.

You can also download the policy (PDF) here.

Harshavardhan R.

PPPs in Infrastructure

The Confederation of Indian Industries, Southern Region (CII-SR) organized a conference called Suminfra on Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) in Infrastructure in Chennai last week. Several speakers spoke about very relevant issues that affect PPPs in India, most of which we will also discuss in our course. Dr. A. Ramakrishna, who was the president of L&T and is now an adjunct professor at IIT-M spoke of the need to re-define contractor procurement procedures, Mr. Venkatesh of L&T spoke about bringing in more flexibility into contracting mechanisms, a speaker from CRISIL described the creation of an overall project-rating system to evaluate PPP opportunities and so on. There was also an interesting presentation on PPPs in water treatment and supply by Tata Projects.

We might reflect on this later in the semester, but there seems to be a gradual shift in the ways infrastructure is being viewed, moving from being transaction or deal-focused to a more holistic integration of long-term sustainability goals. This certainly seems to be the right approach to follow. However, it remains to be seen as to how we actually implement such strategies in practice, outside conferences.