Improving Environmental Sanitation in Urban Slums: Effective Measures

Urban slums in India are home to some of the country’s most resilient communities, yet they remain trapped in cycles of poor sanitation, unsafe water, and inadequate housing. According to UNICEF India, nearly one in six urban Indians lives in a slum where overcrowded conditions, open drains, and limited toilet access turn everyday life into a public health challenge. Improving environmental sanitation here is not just about cleaner streets; it directly affects child survival, women’s safety, and the dignity of millions. The good news is that a combination of government schemes, community-led action, and grassroots education has already shown what works. Here is a closer look at the measures that can transform sanitation in urban slums.

Provision of basic amenities 🔗

The foundation of any sanitation improvement is access to the essentials: a pucca house, clean drinking water, a functional toilet, drainage, and clean cooking energy. Without these, even the best awareness campaigns cannot deliver lasting results. The Government of India has built several flagship programmes to address this gap, and their convergence is what gives slum upgrading its real momentum.

Safe and durable housing 🔗

The Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban (PMAY-U), launched in June 2015, directly targets the housing shortage among slum dwellers and economically weaker sections. Under its In-situ Slum Redevelopment vertical, slum land itself is treated as a resource, and eligible families receive a grant of ₹1 lakh per house built through partnership with private developers. The Beneficiary-led Construction vertical offers ₹1.5 lakh to families who want to construct or upgrade their own home. As of recent reports, more than 1.2 crore houses have been sanctioned under the mission, and the scheme has been extended into a second phase, PMAY-U 2.0, to construct another crore of homes for the urban poor. Importantly, ownership is given to the female head of the household, which strengthens women’s economic security.

Water, toilets, and waste systems 🔗

Clean water and toilets are inseparable from sanitation. A community-based study in the slums of Lucknow found that about 96.5% of families in kaccha slums practiced open-field defecation, while 98.3% disposed of solid waste by throwing it indiscriminately. These numbers explain why the Swachh Bharat Mission – Urban (SBM-U) made toilet construction its centrepiece. The mission aims to make urban India free from open defecation and to achieve 100% scientific management of municipal solid waste across more than 4,000 statutory towns. By 2020, the revised target of building roughly 59 lakh individual household toilets had been achieved, and the second phase of SBM-U, launched in October 2021, focuses on sustaining open-defecation-free status, treating used water, and managing solid waste end-to-end.

For households without space for a private toilet, community and public toilets are essential. Organisations such as Sulabh International have built more than 1.5 million sanitation facilities, many of them pay-and-use models that fund their own maintenance. Bio-toilets that convert human waste into biogas and mobile toilet units are also being deployed in dense settlements where conventional sewerage is difficult to lay.

Clean cooking energy 🔗

Indoor air pollution from biomass and kerosene stoves is a hidden sanitation issue that affects respiratory health, especially among women and children. The Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana provides free LPG connections to households below the poverty line, and PMAY-U has been deliberately designed to converge with Ujjwala, the Saubhagya electricity scheme, and Jan Dhan banking so that a new house also comes with a clean-fuel kitchen, electricity, and a bank account. This convergence is what turns a single home into a complete sanitation upgrade.

Community involvement and the role of NGOs 🔗

Top-down infrastructure alone cannot fix slum sanitation. Toilets fall into disuse, drains get clogged, and waste piles up unless residents themselves take ownership. This is why community participation has become the second pillar of every successful sanitation programme.

Why local participation matters 🔗

Programmes that involve residents from the planning stage tend to outperform those imposed from outside. In Bhubaneswar and Jaipur, community duty bearers who serve on sanitation sub-committees at the slum-settlement level played a crucial role in achieving sanitation inclusion under SBM. These volunteers ensure that vulnerable households, including women, persons with disabilities, the elderly, and sanitation workers, are represented in decision-making. They also help shift mindsets around caste-based taboos that often keep new toilets unused.

The Trichy model in Tamil Nadu is another widely cited example. Public toilets there are operated by women’s self-help groups and resident welfare associations, who collect a small user fee and use it for upkeep. The result is a network of clean, safe facilities that pay for themselves and create local livelihoods.

NGOs and private-sector partnerships 🔗

Non-governmental organisations bring the technical expertise and continuity that municipal staff often lack. NGOs in India work on community toilets, waste management, and hygiene awareness, and they often act as intermediaries between slum residents and government programmes. In Pune, the Cooperative Housing Foundation collaborated with the local waste-pickers’ cooperative SWaCH to set up health committees inside slums, which then negotiated directly with the municipal corporation about sanitation services. The SHWAAS project followed a multi-stakeholder approach involving citizens, NGOs, and public authorities, and although it was not perfect, it showed how shared responsibility produces better outcomes than any single actor working alone.

Waste segregation, composting, and recycling have proved particularly suited to NGO-led models. In Pune, the Zero Waste movement began with community cleaning drives and evolved into a comprehensive waste management system run entirely by residents. Similar groups across the country, from Hasiru Dala in Bengaluru to Chintan in Delhi, train informal waste workers as eco-leaders, formalise their work, and integrate them into the urban waste chain. Corporate Social Responsibility funds are increasingly being channelled into these decentralised models, giving municipalities a cost-effective way to extend services into hard-to-reach areas.

Green spaces and tree planting 🔗

Sanitation is not only about waste removal. Tree planting along slum boundaries, on rooftops, and around community toilets cools the microclimate, reduces dust, absorbs noise, and gives residents a sense of pride in their neighbourhood. Many resident welfare associations now combine monthly cleaning drives with sapling plantation, which builds the habit of caring for shared spaces.

Education and health facilities 🔗

The third pillar of slum sanitation is what happens between people’s ears. Behaviour change is the hardest and most important part of any programme, and it depends on the steady presence of schools and health centres inside the slum itself.

Schools as agents of change 🔗

A school inside a slum is far more than a classroom. It is the most reliable place to teach handwashing, menstrual hygiene, safe drinking-water practices, and the proper use of toilets. Children carry these messages home and often become the first in their family to insist on a clean toilet or a covered water container. A study in eastern Indian slums noted that despite gains under Swachh Bharat, pockets of inequity remain, and that targeted education is essential to close the gap. School-based WASH programmes are now a core part of UNICEF’s work with the Government of India, and UNICEF describes a decade of the Swachh Bharat Mission as transformational, especially for children’s health and women’s dignity.

Health centres and outreach 🔗

Urban Primary Health Centres and Health and Wellness Centres under the Ayushman Bharat programme bring vaccination, antenatal care, deworming, and treatment of diarrhoeal disease right to the doorstep of slum residents. ASHA workers and Anganwadi staff act as the human face of sanitation outreach: they identify malnourished children, counsel pregnant women on safe water, and link families to government schemes. Where these centres function well, the health benefits of toilets and clean water actually translate into lower infant mortality and fewer hospital admissions for waterborne disease.

Awareness campaigns that stick 🔗

Information, Education and Communication (IEC) campaigns under SBM-U use street plays, wall paintings, radio jingles, and mobile apps to keep sanitation visible. The Swachhata App, for instance, lets residents report uncollected garbage or broken public toilets directly to the municipal corporation, creating a feedback loop that did not exist before. The most effective awareness work, however, is repetitive and local: the same message delivered by a trusted neighbour, again and again, until it becomes a habit.

Bringing it all together 🔗

No single intervention can fix slum sanitation. A new toilet is useless without water; a water tap is useless if the drain outside overflows; a clean drain is useless if residents have not been persuaded to segregate their waste. The measures discussed here, basic amenities, community participation, and education with health services, work because they reinforce one another. PMAY-U builds the house, SBM-U builds the toilet, NGOs train the residents, schools teach the children, and health centres treat what slips through. When these pieces are stitched together at the city level through a State Sanitation Strategy and a City Sanitation Plan, the change becomes visible within a few years. The cities that have moved fastest, from Indore to Mysuru, are precisely those that integrated all four layers rather than relying on any one of them.

What do you think? If you had to choose one measure to start with in a slum near you, would you prioritise building infrastructure first or investing in community awareness, and why? And how can young professionals in fields outside public health, such as engineering, design, or finance, contribute meaningfully to improving environmental sanitation in urban slums?

References

1. https://www.unicef.org/india/water-sanitation-and-hygiene-wash
2. https://pmay-urban.gov.in/about
3. https://www.ibef.org/blogs/pradhan-mantri-awas-yojana-a-game-changer-for-urban-and-rural-housing
4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10434291/
5. https://prsindia.org/theprsblog/seven-years-of-swachh-bharat-mission
6. https://www.acash.org.pk/how-to-improve-sanitation-in-slums/
7. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/waste/integrating-community-participation-crucial-for-inclusive-sanitation
8. https://www.mahilahousingtrust.org/slum-development-in-india-importance-initiatives-and-challenges/
9. https://commoning.city/blog/innovative-solutions-to-sanitation-problems-in-urban-slums-pune-india/
10. https://urbanstudies.institute/ecology-environment-urban-development/sanitation-strategies-urban-slums/
11. https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/224/Supplement_5/S573/6433799
12. https://www.unicef.org/india/stories/decade-indias-transformative-sanitation-mission