Sanitation success stories in India and implications for urban sanitation planning

Meeting the challenges of sanitation in citywide planning requires critical reflection of case studies, and the transfer of lessons learned. Drawing from projects of the Bremen Overseas Research and Development Agency (BORDA) in India, we will describe how projects were developed from a planning perspective in two case studies: a community and a private organisation. Using these and other experiences of BORDA, we describe the issues and lessons learned in the area of sanitation planning. BORDA’s experience of including decentralised sanitation options in city planning is indicative of the wider development sector, where the work of collaborations such as the Cities Alliance (CA) have a primary focus of planning level interventions. The criteria suggested in this paper therefore have implications for the expanding role of decentralised planning across the development sector.