For centuries, the Ganges River in India has been the locus of sacred rites for the Hindus. The religious significance of the Ganges is physically manifested in ghats (stepped landings) that form the land-water interface. Besides serving as a site for religious bathing and cremation, the ghats are also tied to people’s livelihoods and are an inseparable part of their daily lives. Today, the increasingly urbanized Ganges basin sustains more than 40 percent of India’s population. At the same time, industrialization and the pressures of a growing population along its banks have contributed to alarming levels of pollution in the river. In 1985, the federal government of India launched the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) with the primary objective of cleaning the river. However, characterized by centralized planning and control with little public participation, the GAP had limited impact. In 2011, the government launched yet another clean up program—the National Ganga River Basin Project—with support from the World Bank. In this paper, we take a closer look at the programs to highlight the tenuous relationship between the need for ‘efficient’ management of environmental problems and public participation. Can public participation fit into the technocratic model that is often adopted by environmental programs? What approaches to participation kindle authorship and empowerment among those who share a deep relationship with the river and the ghats? Can religious practices be accommodated within scientific frameworks of adaptive management and resilience? We argue that rethinking the relationship between pollution control programs and participation is crucial for any effort to clean the Ganges, restore its waterfront, and catalyze broader regeneration in the Ganges basin.

The urban landscape in India is dotted with water and sanitation projects centred on the mantra of community participation and management. Yet there is much that remains to be learned about such projects, particularly in smaller urban centres where the pressures of urbanization are threatening to overwhelm local government efforts to provide basic services. Drawing on case studies of community-managed sewerage programmes in two cities in central India, this paper explores the status of sanitation in low-income, informal settlements and critically examines how such programmes unfold on the ground. The findings highlight lessons for future sanitation policy and programmes.

Fifty years ago, Sherry Arnstein presented “a ladder of citizen participation,” highlighting the relevance of citizen participation for the social imperatives of her time. Today, there is widespread emphasis on public participation in planning practice. Planning education stresses its importance in addressing the principles of social justice. This prompted us to explore how graduate students on the threshold of becoming planning practitioners designed public engagement tools, and facilitated participation to examine proposed transit-oriented development plans. Our paper analyzes the nature of their engagement and reflection, spotlighting the potential and pitfalls of doing public participation. We find that enabling critical pedagogical approaches to engender collaborative and reflective practice benefits students, educators, and the profession in distinct ways.

Decentralization reconfigures urban water governance by transferring responsibilities for service delivery to local institutions and expanding the role for non-state actors. Consequently, community-managed water supply projects exemplify a proliferation of participatory arrangements—typically those that promise capacity building in low-income communities to enable them to partner with the state in delivering basic services. Drawing on a cross-case analysis of how three such projects unfolded on the ground in India, I examine the coproduction of water supply—a manifestation of the shift in water governance. The findings delineate its role in (re)shaping local-level state-community relations and underscore implications for urban service delivery.

At the deadline for meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), 2.1 billion (10⁹) people had gained access to improved sanitation and 95 countries were able to meet the MDG sanitation target. However, 2.4 billion still lacked improved sanitation facilities. India is among those countries where open defecation stubbornly persists. Despite decades of government spending on the construction of toilets, and the recent Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) to eradicate open defecation, demand for toilet use remains weak. To draw attention to the deep deficits in sanitation services in smaller Indian cities, we explore what motivates sanitation uptake by the urban poor. Household survey data from 13 low-income settlements combined with interviews, focus-group discussions, and transect walks in three cities in central India allowed us to examine factors that influenced resource-constrained households' toilet ownership and toilet use versus open defecation. Our findings indicate that in urban settings toilet ownership could, in fact, deter open defecation given the presence of other key conditions. Programs to build toilets under the SBM could, therefore, see favorable outcomes in cities provided there is a broadening of access to sanitation to include fecal sludge management. Our findings also underscore the importance of coproducing basic services.