Dear Elisabeth,

sorry for the delay in response, but better late than never.

The aim of developing the guidelines and the planned process was that the government owns it rather than it becoming just a set of recommendations from the project. Therefore the guidelines were developed in consultation with few actors (from the sector) working in the government or working to advise the government, lawyers, stakeholders from civil societies and organizations working in the sector. Once the draft was ready, it was reviewed intensely by few sector specialists. Following this, some of the actions that were carried out to ensure that the actors in State are aware of the importance of policy for faecal sludge management are listed below:

1. A consultation meeting was conducted to take views, suggestions of all the stakeholders who are involved/responsible for providing sanitation facilities in the State. Mainly Water and Sewerage Board, Directorate of Municipal Administration-DMA(Head of all urban local bodies), institutes, NGOs and Law schools
2. Comments provided were validated and incorporated in the guidelines and submitted to Government (DMA) for approval
3. DMA suggested to implement the process recommended in the guidelines in one of the towns of Karnataka
4. Devanahali Town managed by a Town Municipal Council (TMC) is selected for pilot implementation of operational guidelines, as town is interested in sanitation and has been proactive in taking initiatives on earlier occasions
5. Efforts are on to share the learnings from the implementation process with other towns through field visits and workshops
6. The lessons learnt in the implementation process will be incorporated in the final version of the guidelines and then the Government will initiate the process of rolling it out for all towns

Some initial lessons learnt are that ‘champions’ in the government/town help significantly for FSM to be made effective, capacity building of ULBs as a parallel activity is helpful, survey (even if town is small) can be challenging, ‘informed’ assumptions will have to be made in the survey data analysis as it is almost impossible to get 100% actual data from field and an incremental approach to guideline implementation might be more realistic than an absolute implementation.

Regards

Hi CDD-Society,

This looks like an interesting document. I wonder though what process you are working on to ensure that the guidelines will have any sort of "traction" in the state, i.e. how can you ensure that the actors in Karnataka will endorse them or adhere to them? Could you please explain the process you are following in that respect?

And the file is quite heavy with 14 MB and is protected (one cannot copy and paste from it). Could you perhaps provide a lower resolution file for people with slow internet connectivity and remove the file protection?

Regards,
Elisabeth

P.S. I think I have mentioned this to you by e-mail before, but it would be nice if you could edit your forum profile a little, at least add a profile signature (with your website), so that we know more about you. Could you also sign your posts with a name please so that we know who is writing?
More information about how to edit one's profile (with a video tutorial) is available here:
forum.susana.org/forum/categories/134-us...-with-video-tutorial
Thanks a lot.

According to the figures of the Census 2011 for the state Karnataka, India, there are 906.083 households in urban areas which have septic tanks and 636,644 households which have pit latrines. Currently, the emptying or desludging needs of these on-site sanitation systems are being serviced by government-owned and privately-owned vacuum trucks, colloquially known as honey-suckers. These service take care of the emptying and transport of faecal sludge, but management of the full cycle of sanitation is hampered by lack of designated treatment or disposal sites for depositing the transported sludge and suitable treatment facilities.

These guidelines propose the recognition of the good practices on treating and disposing septage/faecal sludge and efficient regulation of the sanitation value chain where necessary

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