Sanitation services are necessary to support urban stability, enable social balance, economic growth and development and are imperative for the improvement of urban public services. In the absence of proper sanitation, people suffer from high levels of infectious, contagious, water borne, air borne and vector borne diseases leading to high incidences of morbidity and mortality. This directly affects the ability of a country to maintain an efficient economy and implies great personal suffering among infected individuals and their families.

This report “Community-Municipal Corporation-NGO Partnership for City-wide Pro-poor Slums’ Infrastructure Improvement” is an outcome of a joint documentation and review done by local women’s groups, Women’s Action for Village Empowerment (WAVE) Federation, the NGO Gramalaya, Tiruchirappalli City Corporation (TCC) officials and WaterAid in 2008. It has been undertaken to draw policy recommendations from the experience of community-managed toilets, and bathing and washing complexes in the slums of the city of Tiruchirappalli during July 2006. It also sought to understand the benefits of CMTs and the challenges facing this model after six years of experimentation and draw out lessons for building on this success.