Technical support to the State Government of Maharashtra on urban sanitation and FSSM

CWAS has been supporting implementation of Swachh Maharashtra Mission (Urban) since 2015. This was instrumental in making all cities in Maharashtra ODF in 2017. With this, the Government of Maharashtra launched a sustainability charter for ODF and embarked on the next stage of making all cities ODF+ and ODF++ under Swachh Bharat mission frameworks with faecal sludge and septage management (FSSM).  Under this project funded by BMGF in 2019, CWAS aims to provide continued support to SMMUA through a “technical support unit” (TSU).

The TSU has facilitated development of a state FSSM strategy for ensuring safe treatment and disposal of faecal waste in all 384 cities and is actively providing implementation and extensive capacity building support for the same. This includes planning, design, scale-up and monitoring of co-treatment and independent FSTPs across the state. So far, 70+ cities are practicing co-treatment and 200+ FSTPs are functional. The next set of activities in the state deal with scaling up of scheduled desludging and gender mainstreaming in sanitation across the state based on examples of Wai and Sinnar.

The team also provides regular support to the Swachh Maharashtra Mission for facilitating ODF/ODF+/ ODF++ certifications and capacity building for annual Swachh Sarvekshan. The project also consists of a component on Institutional building of CWAS as a Center of Excellence for Urban Sanitation.