WASH security in India

India has been making policies relating to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector since independence. The 2010 policy guidelines for water as well as sanitation have embarked on a new path of water security by identifying and emphasising the importance of hither to nagging bottlenecks to sustainable service delivery. Thus the new guidelines are a step in the right direction, but fall short in number of follow up aspects for achieving the stated objectives. Besides, as is the case with earlier guidelines, they fail to provide effective framework for operationalising the guidelines at the implementation level. This paper attempts to assess these policies critically and suggest ways to make them effective in terms of operationalising them. The key issues include: i) WASH sector financing need to be addressed upfront with more realistic assessment of unit costs and their composition. Adoption of Life Cycle Cost Approach (LCCA) framework would be a useful tool in this regard. ii) Within the WASH sector, sanitation needs special focus in terms of planning and allocations. Treating sanitation as an add-on to water would not be enough to improve the poor sanitation and hygiene conditions. These sub-sectors need main streaming. iii) Approach to sanitation need to be focused on creating demand at the household level, segregating private and public responsibilities in this regard. Subsidies towards private toilet construction is not effective and needs to be channelized towards environmental sanitation such as solid and liquid waste management.