Access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation is considered as a basic human right. Swachh Bharat Mission – Gramin (Rural), launched by the Government of India in 2014, is hailed as an attempt towards that direction. On 2nd October 2019, India was declared free from open defecation, with rural households having full toilet coverage. However, despite Government claims, the existing literature indicates the presence of slippage: where households practice open defecation despite having access to toilets. Equating progress in sanitation interventions with mere toilet provision presents a partial assessment of sanitation. To address the gap, the ‘Sanitation Well-being’ framework, based on Amartya Sen's concept of justice, has been proposed. It identifies slippage as an outcome of various underlying factors across the sanitation life-cycle. The framework provides a lens to analyse existing frameworks and secondary data sets and finds that they do not capture the dynamism inherent in the sector. The efficacy of the framework has been tested in the rural district of Shravasti, Uttar Pradesh, India, through the rapid rural appraisal method. Through our investigation, we found that slippage exists in the field, and that the framework is a feasible instrument to assess sanitation as a comprehensive phenomenon.
Within the context of decentralised environmental governance, this article seeks to answer the question which institutional arrangements may be most effective in delivering the promise of better community-centred forest governance. The specific objective is to analyse the impact that decentralisation of resource management has on the effectiveness of forest governance. Using a comparative case study framework, the article finds that decentralisation functions better when nested structures with a plurality of bodies are in operation. However, the case studies also highlight the need for constant monitoring as a necessarily ongoing crucial process to protect the ecological sustainability of forest resource governance as well as strengthening equitable social structures at the village level.
The Indian Forest Policy of 1988 and the subsequent government resolution on participatory forest management emphasized the need for people's participation in natural forest management. This article lays out the institutions that emerge from this strategy and their involvement in decentralized Forest Resource Management. It also traces the inter-linkages between them in the governance of the forest resource in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu.Two levels of inquiry have been undertaken, one at the institutional level and the other at the household level. Based on data collected, using quantitative and qualitative methods, it is found that the presence of civil society organizations (CSOs) have an effect on the functioning of government institutions. The article informs the assessment that decentralization has a two-pronged function of bringing governance closer to the people and to also bring more political will to the people.
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