Water, Sanitation and Poor

摘要

Adequate provision of basic infrastructure, including water & sanitation to poor communities in urban slums and villages is ever-growing challenge. India's villages and urban slums lack access to basic services like safe drinking water, sanitation, sewerage, roads, etc. Physical infrastructure provisions to existing settlements, particularly water and sanitation can transform human habitat at a fraction of cost to rebuilding whole new settlements. Catalytic government and community investment in infrastructure in turn stimulates massive community investment in shelter, toilets and other facilities. Knock on impact of this change to health, education and incomes is substantial and rapid. This paper illustrates how the concept of Slum Networking has been successfully used to address the core issue of water and sanitation for communities. It is an innovative concept, which exploits linkage between slums, natural drainage paths that influence urban infrastructure and environmental fabric of city. It converges scales, activities, agencies, resources for sustainable and cost effective improvement in quality of life. Further, attempt has been made to adapt the concept to villages where no substantial infrastructure development has taken place, since there are many similarities between the poor urban areas and villages in terms of levels of infrastructure, settlement patterns and community structures.