India’s Water and Sanitation Policies: From National Water Policy to Urban Sanitation

Water and sanitation form the bedrock of public health, dignity, and economic productivity, yet for decades these basics remained out of reach for millions. To address these gaps, the government rolled out two landmark frameworks, the National Water Policy of 2002 and the National Urban Sanitation Policy of 2008. Together they signalled a shift from ad-hoc infrastructure building toward integrated, behaviour-conscious, and sustainable governance of water and waste.

The National Water Policy of 2002: Rethinking a scarce resource 🔗

India holds about 18 per cent of the world’s population but only around 4 per cent of its freshwater resources, a mismatch that has only grown sharper with urbanisation and climate stress. The first National Water Policy was adopted in 1987, and its 2002 revision attempted to respond to demand pressures, groundwater depletion, and uneven access across states.

The 2002 policy, released by the Ministry of Water Resources, was anchored in the idea of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM). It treated water as a finite, vulnerable national resource that had to be planned for across sectors rather than parcelled out department by department. The policy emphasised conservation through optimal, economical, sustainable and equitable means, marking a clear departure from the earlier supply-side mindset.

Sustainable development and conservation 🔗

Sustainability sat at the heart of the 2002 document. The policy laid down a clear hierarchy of water allocation: drinking water first, followed by irrigation, hydro-power, ecology, agro-industries and non-agricultural industries, navigation and other uses. This priority order recognised that human survival and food security must come before commercial use.

It also paid attention to groundwater, which supports nearly two-thirds of the country’s irrigation and most of its drinking needs. The policy called for groundwater extraction to be regulated in line with recharge capacity, and for the detrimental environmental effects of over-exploitation to be prevented. Watershed management, rainwater harvesting, and the maintenance of ecological flows in rivers were explicitly endorsed.

Private sector participation and financial sustainability 🔗

A significant innovation of the 2002 policy was its openness to private sector participation. Recognising that public funds alone could not bridge the investment gap in dams, distribution networks, and treatment plants, the policy encouraged private players in planning, development, and management of water resources projects. It also emphasised the physical and financial sustainability of water services, hinting at the need for cost recovery through realistic user charges.

At the same time, the policy promoted the idea of multi-purpose projects, where a single intervention could deliver irrigation, drinking water, hydropower, and flood control benefits together, with attention to the needs of disadvantaged sections of society. Inter-basin transfers were also flagged as a possible response to regional water imbalances, though this remains a contested area today.

What the 2002 policy could not solve 🔗

Despite these intentions, scholars have noted that the NWP 2002 fell short on flood control, irrigation efficiency, pollution of water bodies, and access to potable water and sanitation in rural and urban areas. These gaps eventually pushed the government to draft the National Water Policy of 2012, and more recently a fresh policy under the Mihir Shah Committee that calls for a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach to a sector now strained by climate change.

The National Urban Sanitation Policy of 2008 🔗

If the 2002 water policy reframed water as a scarce resource to be conserved, the National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP) of 2008 did something equally important: it brought sanitation out of the shadows. Released by the Ministry of Urban Development, the policy was a response to a striking reality, that nearly 60 million urban residents lacked improved sanitation and over two-thirds of urban wastewater flowed back into the environment untreated.

The NUSP was structured around integrated city-wide sanitation plans, institutional strengthening, awareness generation, behavioural changes, pro-poor approaches and cost-effective technologies. It pushed states to formulate State Sanitation Strategies and cities to prepare City Sanitation Plans, embedding sanitation into mainstream urban planning.

Open defecation free cities and the full waste cycle 🔗

A defining target of the NUSP was the creation of open defecation free (ODF) cities. Beyond simply building toilets, the policy emphasised the full sanitation cycle, covering containment, collection, transport, treatment, and safe disposal of human and liquid waste. As one scholarly review notes, the policy recognised the importance of the entire waste cycle, with 100 per cent collection and treatment of waste explicitly laid out as goals.

Crucially, the NUSP did not prescribe any single technology. It encouraged states and cities to choose solutions that matched local conditions, whether sewer networks, decentralised wastewater treatment, or faecal sludge management for areas without piped sewerage. This flexibility was a quiet but important shift from earlier rigid, infrastructure-first approaches.

Awareness and behavioural change 🔗

The policy was also significant for treating behaviour as central, not peripheral. It called for Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) campaigns to build demand for toilets, address taboos around sanitation and menstrual hygiene, and link cleanliness with dignity and health. The logic was simple: building a toilet does not guarantee its use if cultural and social attitudes do not shift alongside.

Pro-poor focus and rating of cities 🔗

The NUSP placed strong emphasis on serving the urban poor, who are most exposed to the costs of inadequate sanitation. To make progress measurable, the Ministry of Urban Development introduced a city sanitation rating exercise. According to a Wikipedia overview drawing on government data, about 40 per cent of cities fell into the red category needing immediate remedial action, more than 50 per cent in the black category needing considerable improvement, and not a single city qualified as a green or healthy city. The rating system created peer pressure and a baseline against which future improvements could be tracked.

The NUSP also fed into later flagship programmes. The Swachh Bharat Mission, launched in 2014, built on earlier sanitation efforts and aimed at eliminating open defecation, drawing heavily on the NUSP’s behavioural and city-wide approach. Reported open defecation has dropped sharply, though independent surveys suggest the picture is more uneven than official numbers indicate.

Implementation challenges on the ground 🔗

Strong policies on paper rarely translate into clean rivers and reliable taps without addressing the messy realities of governance, finance, and human behaviour. Both the NWP and NUSP have struggled on these fronts.

Funding gaps and fragmented finance 🔗

Water and sanitation are capital-intensive, and the financing structure has often been uneven. Under the 11th Five Year Plan, about 55 per cent of investments were to be financed by the central government, 28 per cent by state governments, 8 per cent through institutional financing, 8 per cent by external agencies and only 1.5 per cent by the private sector, with local governments not expected to contribute. This left urban local bodies dependent on grants, even as they were tasked with operation and maintenance.

Smaller municipalities particularly struggle, as high capital and operational costs associated with advanced treatment technologies deter investment, especially in smaller municipalities. Many sewage treatment plants either operate below capacity or remain non-functional due to maintenance issues and a shortage of skilled personnel.

Overlapping institutional roles 🔗

Water is a state subject, but multiple central, state, and local agencies share responsibility for planning, supply, sanitation, and pollution control. This produces overlapping mandates and weak coordination. In Rajasthan, for instance, the Public Health and Engineering Department handles infrastructure, the Water Resource Department oversees canals and dams, and the Panchayati Raj Department manages rural sanitation and wastewater. Such fragmentation makes integrated planning, the very ideal championed by the NWP, difficult in practice.

Wastewater reuse illustrates the same problem. Analysts have found that India’s institutional framework for wastewater reuse is fragmented, with responsibilities divided across multiple national, state and local agencies, leading to weak coordination, poor enforcement and limited financial incentives. Only a minority of states have well-defined wastewater reuse policies.

Public engagement and behavioural change 🔗

Both policies recognise that infrastructure alone is not enough. Toilets sit unused, taps are wasted, and treatment plants are bypassed when communities are not part of the design and upkeep. Sustained behavioural change requires schools, panchayats, women’s groups, resident welfare associations, and the media to be active partners, not passive recipients.

The experience of the Swachh Bharat Mission supports this point. Its leaders later acknowledged that democratising communities and getting them to take the lead in making villages open defecation free was central to progress. The mission relied on more than a million masons and millions of school students to drive change, showing that mass participation is a strategy, not a slogan.

Climate, equity, and the road ahead 🔗

Climate variability, depleting groundwater, and growing inequality between rural and urban areas add new layers to old challenges. Independent monitoring still shows pockets of open defecation, untreated sewage in rivers, and unequal access for slum residents and marginalised communities. Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 on clean water and sanitation will require not just more money but smarter institutions, transparent monitoring, and genuine community ownership.

What do you think? Should water and sanitation services in your city be managed more by elected local bodies, by independent utilities, or by public-private partnerships, and what trade-offs would each choice involve? How can policies be designed so that behavioural change keeps pace with the pipes and toilets being built?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_water_policy
2. https://www.indiawaterportal.org/articles/national-water-policy-ministry-water-resources-2002
3. https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=70832
4. https://www.indiawaterportal.org/faqs/water-policies-india-past-and-present
5. https://sswm.info/content/national-urban-sanitation-policy
6. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956247814567058
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_India
8. https://kingcenter.stanford.edu/news/transforming-indias-sanitation-policy-and-practice
9. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772655X25000266
10. https://www.csis.org/analysis/indias-water-and-sanitation-30-blueprint-sustainable-development
11. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/water/policy-and-governance-roadblocks-are-the-biggest-challenges-to-treated-water-reuse