India’s Water and Sanitation Policy: National Efforts for Sustainable Solutions

Water and sanitation are not just civic services. They are the backbone of public health, dignity, and economic stability. In a country where over 600 million people once faced extreme water stress and where dense urban settlements continue to struggle with sewage management, policy frameworks have become the central tool for organising a national response. Two documents stand at the heart of this effort: the National Water Policy of 2002 and the National Urban Sanitation Policy of 2008. Together with financing schemes like JNNURM and UIDSSMT, they shaped how cities and states approach water management, sanitation infrastructure, and behavioural change.

Why a national water and sanitation policy was needed
National Water Policy 2002
Priority of use and water as an economic good
Private sector participation
Water conservation and groundwater management
Sustainable resource management
National Urban Sanitation Policy 2008
Vision and core objectives
City sanitation plans and city rating
Behaviour change as a central pillar
Implementation and financing
JNNURM as the principal vehicle
UIDSSMT for smaller towns
Linking financing to policy goals
Future goals and continuing challenges
From rights and access to quality and sustainability

Why a national water and sanitation policy was needed

By the early 2000s, the country was facing a paradox. Despite having a vast river system and large groundwater reserves, water scarcity was rising sharply, urban sewerage was overwhelmed, and open defecation remained widespread. Nearly 60 million people in urban areas lacked access to improved sanitation, and more than two-thirds of wastewater was discharged untreated into rivers, lakes, and land. Rapid urbanisation, climate variability, and rising domestic and industrial demand exposed the limits of fragmented, state-level approaches.

The Centre therefore stepped in with two cornerstone frameworks. The first focused on the resource itself-water-and the second on safe disposal of human waste in urban areas. Both were designed to be enabling documents that states and cities could translate into local action plans.

National Water Policy 2002

The revised National Water Policy was adopted by the National Water Resources Council on 1 April 2002, replacing the earlier 1987 policy. It treated water as a prime natural resource, a basic human need, and a precious national asset whose planning, development, and management had to be guided by national perspectives rather than narrow state interests.

Priority of use and water as an economic good

One of the most debated elements of the policy was its allocation hierarchy. The 2002 policy stated that after meeting pre-emptive needs for safe drinking water and sanitation, food security, livelihoods of the poor dependent on agriculture, and minimum ecosystem needs, water should be treated as an economic good to promote conservation and efficient use. Drinking water for humans and animals was placed at the top of the list, ahead of irrigation, hydropower, navigation, and industrial use.

Treating water as an economic good was a significant shift. It opened the door for tariff reforms, volumetric pricing, and recovery of operation and maintenance costs-ideas that had previously been resisted on the grounds of social welfare.

Private sector participation

The policy explicitly encouraged private sector participation in the planning, development, and management of water resource projects wherever feasible. The intent was to bring in capital, technology, and managerial expertise to supplement public investment. This was a notable departure from a tradition of viewing water purely as a state monopoly.

Water conservation and groundwater management

The 2002 framework emphasised improving efficiency of water utilisation across all uses and promoting conservation consciousness through education, regulation, incentives, and disincentives. It pushed for artificial recharge of groundwater, rooftop rainwater harvesting, desalination in coastal regions, and revival of traditional water bodies. Effluents had to be treated to acceptable standards before being discharged into natural streams, and minimum flows had to be maintained in perennial rivers to keep ecological systems alive.

Sustainable resource management

Sustainability was woven through the policy in several ways. It called for integrated planning at the river basin level, regular monitoring of both surface and groundwater quality, and a phased programme to improve water quality. The policy emphasised the need for periodic modifications in response to changes in economic, social, climatic, and demographic conditions, signalling that water governance could not be a one-time exercise.

The policy was later updated in 2012, with a sharper focus on the right to safe drinking water, water-use efficiency, and the impact of climate change. A committee headed by Mihir Shah submitted a draft of a further revised policy in October 2021, calling for a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approach that reflects contemporary challenges.

National Urban Sanitation Policy 2008

While the water policy dealt with the resource, the National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP) tackled what happens after water is used. Launched in 2008 by the Ministry of Urban Development, it was remarkable as a standalone policy for urban sanitation, given that there is no matching national policy for urban water supply. It is widely considered one of the most comprehensive sanitation frameworks of its time.

Vision and core objectives

The NUSP set out a vision of cities and towns that are totally sanitised, healthy, and liveable, with safe sanitation as a universal entitlement. Its core objectives clustered around four ideas:

Awareness generation and behaviour change: Recognising that infrastructure alone cannot solve sanitation, the policy stressed information, education, and communication to shift household and community practices around toilet use, hand washing, and waste disposal.

Open defecation-free cities: The policy aimed at developing state sanitation strategies and city sanitation plans that would lead to open defecation-free cities and sanitary, safe disposal of human and liquid wastes. This was a defining commitment, since open defecation in urban India was concentrated in slums and pavement settlements where toilets were either absent or unusable.

Integrated sanitation systems: Instead of treating toilets, sewerage, drainage, and solid waste in isolation, the NUSP pushed for an integrated approach that covered the entire sanitation value chain–containment, collection, conveyance, treatment, and safe disposal or reuse of human excreta and wastewater.

Inclusive access for the poor: The policy specifically prioritised the urban poor and vulnerable groups, calling for community and public toilets in slums, markets, transit hubs, and tourist sites, along with services that the poor could actually use and afford.

City sanitation plans and city rating

Implementation was anchored in city sanitation plans prepared by urban local bodies, supported by state-level sanitation strategies. To create accountability, the policy introduced a national rating exercise based on 19 sanitation indicators. Cities were classified as Red, Black, Blue, or Green to denote increasing levels of environmental and public health outcomes, with red being the lowest and green the highest. The exercise was carried out in hundreds of cities and towns, making sanitation performance visible and comparable for the first time.

Behaviour change as a central pillar

The policy treated behaviour change not as an add-on but as central to success. Earlier sanitation campaigns had focused largely on the supply side, subsidising toilet construction with limited behaviour change in the field. The NUSP attempted to correct this by linking infrastructure with sustained awareness drives, school programmes, and engagement with community-based organisations.

Implementation and financing

Policies on paper require money on the ground. The financing strategy combined dedicated urban renewal missions with state and city contributions.

JNNURM as the principal vehicle

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) was launched in December 2005 as a reform-linked investment programme. It focused on around 65 large cities and included two sub-missions: Urban Infrastructure and Governance (UIG) for infrastructure and Basic Services for the Urban Poor (BSUP) for shelter and basic services in slums. The mission ran for seven years up to March 2012 and was later extended up to March 2014. Sanitation projects-sewerage networks, sewage treatment plants, drainage, and solid waste management-were a major beneficiary, with sanitation accounting for about 24 per cent of UIG funding.

UIDSSMT for smaller towns

Large cities, however, are only part of the urban story. To support medium and small towns, the government launched the Urban Infrastructure Development Scheme for Small and Medium Towns (UIDSSMT), a sub-component of JNNURM. The scheme is funded in an 80:10 ratio by the Central and State governments, with urban local bodies bearing the remaining share. UIDSSMT covered water supply, sewerage, drainage, solid waste management, roads, and redevelopment of inner city areas, with sanitation projects receiving roughly 29 per cent of its funds.

Linking financing to policy goals

The financing architecture was intentionally aligned with the National Urban Sanitation Policy. The Government continues to explore synergies among schemes like JNNURM, UIDSSMT, and lump-sum allocations for North-Eastern States to fund projects proposed under city sanitation plans. After JNNURM ended, projects with significant progress were absorbed into successor missions such as the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) and the Swachh Bharat Mission, which carried forward the open defecation-free agenda with even greater scale.

Future goals and continuing challenges

The policy and financing landscape has clearly delivered visible gains. Toilet coverage has expanded dramatically, sewerage networks have grown, and the idea of city-wide sanitation planning is now mainstream. Yet several challenges persist.

Open defecation has not been fully eliminated. A joint monitoring report by the World Health Organization and UNICEF released in July 2021 stated that at least 15 per cent of the population still defecates in the open, with 1 per cent in urban and 22 per cent in rural areas. Wastewater treatment capacity, although growing, still lags behind generation, and many treatment plants operate well below their installed capacity. Faecal sludge from septic tanks, used by a large share of households outside formal sewerage networks, often ends up in open drains or fields.

The future direction is shaped by a few key priorities: extending safe sanitation beyond toilets to the full waste cycle, building climate-resilient water and sanitation infrastructure, ensuring that the urban poor are not left out of upgrades, and strengthening urban local bodies financially and technically so that they can operate and maintain assets created with central funds. A UN Special Rapporteur visit highlighted that eliminating open defecation requires adequate methods for behaviour change and sufficient water supply as a prerequisite for sustainable use of low-cost latrines, a reminder that water and sanitation cannot be planned in silos.

From rights and access to quality and sustainability

The next phase of policy is increasingly about quality, equity, and sustainability rather than just access. This means moving from counting toilets to measuring whether they are used, maintained, and connected to safe disposal systems. It also means rethinking water pricing, groundwater regulation, urban water-body protection, and the role of treated wastewater as a resource for non-potable uses.

What do you think? Do you believe city-wide sanitation plans and rating systems are enough to push urban local bodies into action, or do we need stronger legal mandates and citizen oversight? And in your own city or town, what would have the biggest impact-better infrastructure, stricter regulation of polluters, or sustained behaviour change campaigns?

References

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India’s Water and Sanitation Policy: National Efforts for Sustainable Solutions

Table of Contents

Why a national water and sanitation policy was needed 🔗

National Water Policy 2002 🔗

Priority of use and water as an economic good 🔗

Private sector participation 🔗

Water conservation and groundwater management 🔗

Sustainable resource management 🔗

National Urban Sanitation Policy 2008 🔗

Vision and core objectives 🔗

City sanitation plans and city rating 🔗

Behaviour change as a central pillar 🔗

Implementation and financing 🔗

JNNURM as the principal vehicle 🔗

UIDSSMT for smaller towns 🔗

Linking financing to policy goals 🔗

Future goals and continuing challenges 🔗

From rights and access to quality and sustainability 🔗