Sparks Big Change

Innovative sanitation is bringing health and dignity to Odisha’s towns, with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Arghyam Foundation.

Nearly half of India’s urban population lack access to basic sanitation systems. The smaller towns in the state of Odisha, located in the east of India, are some of the most deprived.

In small towns, the population is growing particularly fast, posing a problem for the authorities: setting up new sanitation services in multiple small towns is costly and more complicated than extending existing services in larger cities. Moreover, the municipal authorities have little opportunity to recover the costs invested in sanitation services, meaning they are often deprioritised.

Even the existing toilets have problems: because these small towns are not connected to a conventional piped sewage system, toilets utilise on-site tanks, but emptying them is a health risk, as well as time-consuming for residents. When this project began, there were no treatment facilities for the contents of pit latrines and septic tanks in any municipality in the State of Odisha.

Without proper access to toilets, people were left with no option other than to urinate and defecate outside in the open, where human waste is left untreated. This situation has a devastating impact on the health of the population, especially women and children whose safety is at risk when seeking private areas.

Our approach

Through this pilot project, we demonstrated to local authorities that inclusive, sustainable sanitation solutions can be achieved through a combination of training, private sector partnerships and innovative approaches to service delivery. Our expertise and previous successes helped to earn their trust.

Focusing on the small towns of in Dhenkanal and Angul, we navigated complex, bureaucratic processes to create plans that would benefit the poorest and most vulnerable residents – the people whose needs are often overlooked in conventional city planning. Key activities included:

• Construction of new community toilets.
• New waste processing plants that treat and dispose of human waste safely.
• Improved working conditions for waste tank-emptiers, and a free phone service for residents to request same-day tank emptying.
• Establishment of ‘Sanitation Committees’, where residents can set priorities and raise issues with the local government, as well as promoting good hygiene practices to their peers. 

We’ve now handed over project management and day-to-day delivery to the municipalities, making it a long-term, sustainable solution. Thanks to the guidelines, reports, and waste-management models produced, our work is being replicated and scaled up.

Our goals

Project Nirmal focuses on city-wide sanitation in two towns. It aims to increase the number of toilets available, especially for slum dwellers, and create safe pit-emptying services and treatment facilities for the whole town through collaboration with city governments and private sector participation. The learnings support the case for replicating the model right across Odisha State. Our goals were:

• Secure a long-term commitment from the state and local Governments towards sanitation service delivery in small towns.
• Capacity development of states and cities for effective sanitation service delivery.
• Increase in the number of people with access to better sanitation services in the pilot towns.
• Improvement of the city-wide planning approaches for sanitation.
• Demonstration of the effectiveness of Faecal Sludge Management (FSM) models.