Rural Water Supply and Sanitation (RWSS)

India’s RWSS Sector is rapidly evolving. TARU is playing a crucial role in shaping and refining the Sector’s reform agenda and facilitating its institutionalization. Our work in the Sector spans 18 Indian States.

Our situation analyses and programme and thematic assessments in the early and mid 1990s brought hitherto less appreciated issues around source and system sustainability, community ownership and equity to the fore and more recent ones have informed major reform course corrections. In time, we have gone on to devise creative responses to critical sector issues, support their institutionalization and engage with a new ‘generation’ of emergent sector issues.

TARU is among the few agencies that have examined rural sanitation issues closely and exclusively. 

Our RWSS Sector work draws on the robust understanding of sector issues gained from situation analyses and programme and thematic assessments in as many as 11 States. These include one of the first reviews of the Sector Reform Programme (SRP), a rare analyses of the evolution of World Bank-supported reform initiatives in the Sector and multi-State impact assessments of two of the most high-profile rural sanitation initiatives in the country, the Rural Sanitary Marts (RSMs) and Production Centers (PCs) and the Nirmal Gram Puraskar (NGP).

These assessments have influenced course corrections in the Sector reform agenda, Development Partners’ initiatives and GoI-supported programmes and ensured that State-level Sector strategies we have developed and programmes we have designed for clients such as AusAID and DFID, recognize, and respond creatively to, the Sector’s complexities.

In support of institutionalization of Sector reforms, we provided Technical Review Support to the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission (RGNDWM), Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), Government of India (GoI) as it sought to orient the Sector Assessments, Vision Statements, Policy, Strategy and Action Plans prepared by various States in line with reform principles enunciated by it. And in one of the first initiatives of its kind in the country, facilitated service providers in Bihar and Jharkhand in planning for Change Management.

The ongoing multi-State assessment of the working of the Communication and Capacity Development Units (CCDUs), the institutions mandated to respond to the Sector’s crucial capacity building and communication needs, will inform the package of interventions needed to strengthen the CCDUs.