Given that Sanitation planning, monitoring and governance is complex — spanning waste streams, governing ministries, implementing agencies, solution technologies and business models — leveraging Digital Public Infrastructures will enable much-required multiplayer collaboration and solution delivery at population scale, writes Raveena Joseph.
Sanitation services are a crucial component of public service delivery as unsafe and inadequate sanitation has repercussions on public health, the environment, the economy, and social progress. Despite India’s strides in sanitation, following the successes of the Swachh Bharat Mission, unsafe sanitation management results in 80% of India’s water resources becoming severely polluted¹, contributing to preventable water-related diseases like diarrhoea, which kills 3 lakh children every year², and contributes to the stunted growth of 4 crore children³. It also exacerbates many existing vulnerabilities, such as contributing to a school dropout rate of girls (23%)⁴ and causing over 2 million sanitation workers to be employed in high-risk situations⁵.
India’s sanitation systems and services, as well as their governance, require a robust overhaul to ensure the elimination of deaths, diseases, and environmental contamination resulting from unsafe sanitation practices. This is a complex task that requires aligning multiple stakeholders and standardising practices across various aspects of multiple service value chains.
This complexity arises because sanitation services span waste streams, governing ministries, implementing agencies, solution technologies, and business models. Furthermore, service delivery is further customised at the municipal level to cater to existing socio-demographic realities. Additionally, sanitation is not merely a complex service delivery issue; it is also a pressing and evolving problem that is situated at the crucial intersection of public health and environmental concerns.
A Digital Infrastructure for Monitoring and Governance
Digital Public Infrastructures (DPI) work as a digital backbone to the state and provide a platform to record public service transactions. DPIs can be scaled cost-effectively, across Geographies and waste streams, while ensuring that solutions are customisable at the municipal level, to cater to the contexts they serve.
India is a global leader in the use of DPIs, following the success of Aadhaar and UPI in enabling social and financial inclusion. While sanitation requirements and solutions differ across local governments, sanitation waste streams— Faecal Sludge and Septage Management, Solid Waste Management, Plastic Waste Management, etc.—exhibit similar value chains: starting from generation, containment, collection, transport, treatment, and disposal/reuse. These similarities allow us to abstract and digitise various components of the service value chain, with the possibility of encoding standards and enabling visibility into sanitation services.
DPIs, largely built using open-source technologies, are composed of data registries (property log, user registry, GIS data, etc.) and common services (service requests, billing, IoT integration, etc.), which act as reusable digital components that can be quickly leveraged to compose solutions and enable programs with minimal cost and effort. This makes it possible to respond to sanitation requirements at speed and scale. DPIs are built with specific principles—like modularity, interoperability, privacy by design, etc.—that enables the flow of information between systems while ensuring privacy and data security.
Reimagining Service Delivery and Governance
Following the implementation of a Faecal Sludge and Septage Management DPI (called SUJOG-FSSM) in Odisha in late 2021, there is evidence regarding the value of equipping waste value chain workers with digital systems to generate data and visibility. The Odisha DPI has automated processes and simplified the job of frontline workers, allowing greater efficiency and expanding the capacity of value chain workers. For example, earlier, an individual compiled reports and created analytics by consulting multiple stakeholders, whereas now a digital system auto-generates reports and creates dashboards for administrative analysis.
Adopting a digital solution and enabling automation of back-end tasks will quickly translate into efficiency gains for all value-chain actors, allowing them to focus on the more qualitative requirements of their role. This is particularly valuable in resource- constrained government agencies in low and middle-income countries. Over time, data accruing from digitalization will help identify operational bottlenecks and enable resource planning, which will help provide sustainable and reliable sanitation services.
Also Read | Reimagining the Role of Libraries in a Digital World
In the long term, sanitation, as a domain that overlaps with other municipal services, can be streamlined through inter-departmental data-sharing and integration. For example, waste segregation requirements can be mandated and verified while applying for building licences, or septic tank construction standards can be encoded while registering a property. This will lead to ease of working, streamline coordination of actions, and reduce duplication of efforts.
Such real-time transactional data allows for continuous monitoring of sanitation interventions and understanding behavioural patterns of value chain of workers, enabling data-driven reforms and evidence-based policies. The data-based visibility and expansion in state capacity also enable states to ensure inclusion and distributive justice in service delivery.
Digitalisation is an inevitability in today’s world, and paper-based governance is not going to be the way of the future. India is already on its way to enabling the digital transformation of governance in service delivery. DPIs are well-suited to serve this space and reinvent frameworks for sanitation planning and governance in the future.
Note: The author is a policy manager with the Sanitation Mission at eGovernments Foundation, which is working to catalyse digital transformation of sanitation service delivery in India
References:
1 How Water Pollution in India Kills Millions: access here
2 Diarrheal diseases among children in India: Current scenario and future perspectives — access here. 3 Stop stunting by UNICEF: access here.
4 Down To Earth: About 23 per cent girls drop out of school on reaching puberty — access here.
5 The Wire: The Nine Kinds of Manual Scavenging in India — access here.
