The Politics of Visibility in Urban Sanitation: Bureaucratic Coordination and the Swachh Bharat Mission in Tamil Nadu, India

By

Prassanna Raman

S.M. in Architecture Studies, MIT (2012)

B.A. in Economics and Art History, Williams College (2008)

Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in International Development

at the

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

May 2020

© 2020 Prassanna Raman. All Rights Reserved

The author hereby grants to MIT the permission to reproduce and to

distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of the thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created.

Author_______________________________________________________

Department of Urban Studies and Planning (February 14, 2020)

Certified by____________________________________________________

Gabriella Y. Carolini Associate Professor of International Development and Urban Planning Department of Urban Studies and Planning Dissertation Supervisor

Accepted by____________________________________________________

Jinhua Zhao Associate Professor of Transportation and City Planning

Chair, PhD Committee Department of Urban Studies and Planning

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The Politics of Visibility in Urban Sanitation: Bureaucratic Coordination and the Swachh Bharat Mission in Tamil Nadu, India

by

Prassanna Raman

Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on February 14, 2020 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in

International Development

ABSTRACT Often linked with class and caste and mired in socio-cultural taboos, sanitation has a reputation problem in India. The introduction of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) aims to address these challenges not only at the individual level, but also at the organizational level. SBM heavily banks on the use of reputational devices such as social media campaigns and city rankings to incentivize the sub-national implementation of reforms. While literatures on sanitation implementation highlight coordination between agencies and between agencies and NGOs as key to service improvements, few if any, explore how organizational reputation may affect that coordination. Given the importance afforded to SBM within India’s current march toward sanitation reform, this scholarly lacuna is surprising. My dissertation aims to address this knowledge gap through an in-depth study of coordination, and the role of organizational reputation in the roll-out of SBM in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. First, I ask what impacts public sector coordination in urban sanitation under SBM. Second, I examine whether SBM’s reputational devices have any effects on coordination. Within Tamil Nadu, I focus on two major streams of work within the SBM Urban portfolio—toilet construction and solid waste management—in the cities of Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy. To conduct my study, I use semi-structured interviews with bureaucrats and NGOs, document and social media analysis of SBM materials, and participant observation of behavioral change campaigns run by public agencies and sanitation-centric NGO partners. I found that SBM’s reputational devices were no match for entrenched institutional weaknesses, like poor bureaucratic capacity and administrative incoherence, to incentivize coordination either between agencies or between agencies and NGOs across the three cities. Instead, SBM’s emphasis on social media, city rankings, and certifications has exacerbated the burden of documentation and the “tick-box” culture within agencies. However, I also found that in some cases, SBM’s reputational devices have empowered existing sanitation NGOs by increasing demand for their services. I conclude that SBM’s emphasis on visibility rather than deep institutional reform obfuscates the kind of work needed to improve outcomes in the urban sanitation sector. Thesis Supervisor: Gabriella Y. Carolini Title: Associate Professor of International Development and Urban Planning

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Acknowledgements It takes a village to finish a PhD, and I have been incredibly fortunate to have had so much guidance and love from my international tribe. At MIT, I am grateful for the support and guidance from my stellar dissertation committee. I would like to thank Gabriella Carolini for being an exceptional mentor and a creative and inter-disciplinary scholar. Thank you for always pushing me to do and be better. I do appreciate it, even if my face sometimes says otherwise. I am grateful for Balakrishnan Rajagopal’s expansive knowledge of South Asian history and his incisive views on international development, particularly in South India. Thank you for challenging me to analyze a problem from different angles. I would also like to thank Jim Wescoat for his emphasis on intellectual and methodological rigor. Thank you for continuing the sanitation journey with me from my Master’s thesis. I promise to at least try to make fewer toilet-related puns moving forward. In addition to my dissertation committee, I have had several wonderful teachers around the world from Cedar Girls’ Secondary School in Singapore to La Jolla Country Day School, Williams College, and MIT in the United States: Ooi Kok Leng, Vimala Kumar, Esther Chiam, Doc Stevenson, Marsha Boston, Alice Thornton-Schilling, Tom Perrotti, Billy Simms, Sarah Bakhiet, Lucie Schmidt, Jon Bakija, Elizabeth McGowan, Guy Hedreen, Jon Mee, Tiku Majumder, Peter Low, Anand Swamy, David Tucker-Smith, Holly Edwards, Michael Lewis, Rick Spalding, Diane Davis, and Graham Jones. My teachers have inspired and encouraged me with their intellectual curiosity and commitment to holistic learning. Special thanks to Sandy Wellford, Ellen Rushman, Eran Ben-Joseph, Sylvia Hiestand, Melanie Mala Ghosh, and Madeline Smith for their wisdom and support in helping me navigate the labyrinthine logistics of the PhD process. It was my privilege to learn with and from the PhD students I met at DUSP, who have been an incredible source of friendship and community. I am so excited to share in your post-PhD adventures and accomplishments. Profound thanks to: Elise Harrington for being my virtual fieldwork muse and Instagram victim; Yasmin Zaerpoor for mocking me for my youthful proclivities; Jeff Rosenblum for all the hugs, coffees, and dinners; Hannah Teicher for her special brand of “prickly” friendship and Sham’s dinners; Jason Spicer for being the Blanche to my Sophia; Aria Finkelstein for her sophisticated views on reality TV; Laura Delgado for being a fellow Eph and Trader Joe’s aficionado; Isadora Cruxen for introducing me to brigadeiros and caipirinhas; Asmaa Elgamal for the BollyX classes and performance power poses; Chaewon Ahn for the “indoor hikes;” Shenhao Wang for the late night chats; Cressica Brazier for her dedication to climate change research and activism; and Minjee Kim for being a kickass co-instructor. My dissertation fieldwork in Tamil Nadu has been one of the most valuable learning experiences in my life, both personally and professionally. It was generously supported by MIT-India, the Center for International Studies, and the Lloyd and Nadine Rodwin International Travel Fellowship from DUSP. I would like to thank Resilient Chennai for the opportunity to collaborate with them on their resilience strategy during my fieldwork. I am particularly grateful for the mentorship and kindness of the Chief Resilience Officer, Krishna Mohan Ramachandran. Besides my affiliation with Resilient Chennai, the richness of my fieldwork experience is a result of the generosity and warmth of my

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numerous gatekeepers and interview participants, many of whom took a personal interest in my work and encouraged me to challenge existing conceptualizations of sanitation, policy implementation, and bureaucracies in Western ways of looking at the world. Thank you for being so patient with all of my questions as I attempted to reconcile theoretical frameworks and empirical data. I am incredibly humbled and inspired by your dedication to your work, despite the layers of complexities inherent in navigating the politics of implementation and socio-environmental justice in India. I could not have started or finished the PhD without the love and support of my friends, who have provided me with much-needed perspective, comfort, and comic relief when I was feeling overwhelmed by the banality of academic formalities and personalities.1 Heartfelt thanks to: Rachel Fevrier for being the Charles to my Jake; Carynne McIver Button for being “my person;” Sara Siegmann for being my favorite Hoebag, Anna Rutkovskaya for being the best Babushka; Uzaib Saya for being the Stevie to my Moira; Betsy Todd for recommending the most bizarre TV shows for my entertainment; Selmah Goldberg for our regular lunch dates that kept me sane; Yock Theng Tan for always holding space for me; Jane Lim for all the productive café work dates; Sadiqa Mahmood for living with my dissertation-related spaciness and experimental stress baking; Natasha Ali for introducing me to the wonders of Westside, Big Basket, and Sea Rock; Gayatri Ramdas for her eviscerating meme skills and our epic shopping dates; Sarvesh Ashok for constantly rolling his eyes at my bluntness and for indulging my ardent love for Vijay Sethupathi; and Arjun Bhargava for his affection and all the bickering. I am also grateful to my family who have embraced my graduate school adventures with equal parts love, encouragement, and skepticism. Many thanks to my family in and from India for making data collection so enjoyable. Raju Mama, Janakam Mami, Jayashree Mami, and Kumar Chithappa went out of their way to connect me to people, and made me feel at home in a city I barely knew two years ago. Thank you also to my late grandparents, whose flat I stayed in during fieldwork. Gomia Thatha and Pati, you would have been proud of and entertained by my life in Sampoorna Apartments with its zany inhabitants. Finally, I would like to thank my parents and brother, who have been my ultimate source of unwavering love, strength, and inspiration. Their bemusement and amusement at the arcane academic rituals I endured, combined with their steadfast belief in me, have helped me cope with the many troughs of PhD life and have sweetened my celebration of its rare peaks. My father is a lawyer and my mother and brother are both physicians, and are thus naturally befuddled by the social sciences and my unusual fondness for exploring toilets and trash. Nevertheless, they were enthusiastic research assistants during fieldwork, stoically suffered through reading multiple drafts of dissertation proposals and chapters, and provided real-time encouragement and loving insults on our WhatsApp family group chat, aptly entitled “The Bestest Family Everrr.” My family has taught me the value of hard work, how to navigate adversity with resilience, grace, and humor, and

1 I would also like to acknowledge here the entertainment and stress relief provided by MIT’s GroupX classes (special thanks to Anna Grossman, Fen Tung, and Dalia Debs) and the Dance Complex. I am also grateful for the timeless wisdom of writers I revisit, especially when life feels bleak: L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, J.K. Rowling, Rainer Maria Rilke, Mary Oliver, C.P. Cavafy, and Susan Coolidge.

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the importance of using our privilege to lift up those around us. Amma, thank you for teaching me to fight and to always stand up for who I am and what I believe in. Appa, thank you for teaching me to think critically about the world, and to bravely speak truth to power. Vignesh, thank you for being the best baby brother ever and for modeling grit and passion. I may even forgive you sometime soon for performing surgery on my poor dolls when we were kids. But not yet.

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Table of Contents Chapter 1: Invisible and Intractable: The Sanitation Challenge p. 7 Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework: Organizational Reputation p. 53 and Coordination Chapter 3: Horizontal and Vertical Coordination between Agencies in p. 77 Tamil Nadu Chapter 4: Agency-NGO Coordination in Tamil Nadu p. 112 Chapter 5: Does a Rising Tide Lift All Boats? SBM and p. 137 Organizational Reputation Epilogue on Positionality p. 161 References p. 164 Appendix A: Partial List of Interviews p. 189 Appendix B: Interview Protocol p. 193 Appendix C: List of Swachh Survkeshan 2019 Indicators p. 197

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1| INVISIBLE AND INTRACTABLE: THE SANITATION CHALLENGE

1.1 Motivation

“I am only an IAS2 officer in name. I am actually just a garbage man3.” At a

conference on waste management in Chennai last year, a panelist from the National

Institute of Urban Affairs mentioned this quote from a commissioner at a large municipal

corporation in India to illustrate the urgency in Indian cities around environmental

sanitation. This sector, which includes access to working toilets, solid waste management,

and improvements to sewerage systems, remains a persistent challenge in 21st century

cities, despite global advancements in technology and medicine and the creation of the

Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals (CDC 2012; Water Aid 2016; George

2008; Winters et al. 2014; WSP 2011). The World Health Organization and UNICEF

reported in 2010 that 2.5 billion people around the world did not have access to improved

sanitation infrastructure, which included facilities that ensured hygienic separation of

human contact and human waste (CDC 2012). South Asia bears one of the biggest

sanitation burdens, with only 41% of the region’s population using improved sanitation

facilities (CDC 2012). Further, 33% of the 2.01 billion tons of municipal solid waste

generated annually across the world is not managed in an environmentally sound manner

(World Bank 2018). Besides contributing to environmental pollution, poor sanitation

causes disease and death, affects participation in education and the labor market, and

leads to a life without dignity (Sahoo et al. 2015; CDC 2012).

2 The Indian Administrative Service (IAS) is the country’s elite bureaucratic service. 3 Roadmap to Zero Waste conference organized by the Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Chennai, November 9, 2018.

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Often deemed the “ugly stepsister” to the water sector, sanitation interventions are

less favored in policy circles due to socio-cultural aversions to talking about human waste,

and because successful sanitation interventions offer long-term benefits, beyond electoral

windows of politicians (George 2008; Winters et al. 2014; WSP 2011). In Indonesia, for

example, Bahasa Indonesia does not have a formal word for defecation, and discussions

around human bodily functions and their disposal are not considered culturally

acceptable (WSP 2011). Similarly, there are more celebrities participating in high-profile

charity work for clean water, like Matt Damon and Jay-Z, than for global sanitation

ventures (George 2008). The lack of language and unwillingness to publicly articulate

sanitation concerns are fundamental challenges in broaching the topic of sanitation,

much less mainstreaming the sector’s concerns in government. Here, toilets and trash

diverge. Cultural taboos in discussing bodily functions are more challenging when

discussing toilet interventions, compared to solid waste management which does not

elicit similar feelings of shame and disgust. Further, conventional sanitation

interventions like wastewater treatment plants and underground sewer lines are capital-

intensive and provide tangible benefits in the long run, which may not coincide with

political election and re-election calendars (Winters et al. 2014). There is also a significant

amount of resistance to the construction of solid waste management facilities near homes

and businesses (World Bank 2018). These characteristics make environmental sanitation

an unattractive policy priority for politicians, compared to the relative visibility and

glamor offered by parks, football stadiums, and lake restoration efforts.

To transform the “ugly stepsister” into Cinderella, interventions since the mid-

2000s have incorporated visibility initiatives to normalize discussions around sanitation,

and to educate the public on cultivating hygienic and environmentally friendly habits like

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toilet adoption and composting (Water Aid 2006; CLTS website, Ekane et al. 2014;

George 2008; Doron & Jeffrey 2018). One example is World Toilet Day (November 19),

which was started in 2001 by Jack Sim, a Singaporean philanthropist, and later adopted

by the United Nations in 2013 in an effort to inspire action around the global sanitation

crisis and to raise awareness of Sustainable Development Goal 6 (World Toilet Day

website). 4 In a similar vein, Nelson Mandela participated in a hand washing commercial

to popularize the Millennium Development Goals’ half-hearted attempt to tackle

sanitation (George 2008). When shown at the AfricaSan conference, the sanitation

community was bowled over the pedestrian commercial because of how neglected and

“unloved” they felt (George 2008, p. 123). These efforts to induce behavioral change in

sanitation occur in both the Global North and South. For instance, the Niagara Falls Solid

Waste Education and Enforcement Team in Buffalo, New York, introduced a mascot

called Totes McGoats in 2015 to teach kids the importance of recycling (Basu 2015). On

the other side of the world, at the Sanitation and Drinking Water National Conference in

Indonesia in 2016, a comic strip describing the persistence of sanitation challenges in

slums helped repackage open defecation in rivers in a more entertaining way

(Tampubolon 2016). These efforts focus on improving public communication by local

governments and international organizations, and are part of the behavioral approach to

sanitation in the sector, which earlier solely relied on the construction of physical

infrastructure (Water Aid 2006).

Initially, sanitation interventions to improve toilet access emphasized supply-side

policies, like infrastructure investments and subsidies for individual household latrines

4 This goal promises improved sanitation globally by 2030.

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(the “hardware”), but it became clear that there was a profound disconnect between

sanitation policies, practices, and outcomes on the ground (Mosler 2012; Water Aid

2006). Sanitation and hygiene guidelines issued at the national and international levels

were not followed at the local level, and even when sanitation facilities were available,

people did not choose to use them (Nawab & Nyborg 2009; Ekane et al. 2014; CLTS

website). In the 2000s, this troubling phenomenon prompted the incorporation of

behavioral change policies (the “software”) in the sanitation sector at the international

level to understand and address the cultural and behavioral barriers to adopting healthy

sanitary practices (Mosler 2012; CLTS website; Kar & Chambers 2008). In conjunction

with the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations declared 2008 the

International Year of Sanitation in the Water for Life Decade (2005-2015) to highlight the

centrality of sanitation in eradicating poverty and improving health and well-being

worldwide (UNICEF 2007; UNDESA 2015). This effort to foreground sanitation as a

global challenge emphasized coordination between “hardware” and “software” strategies

(UNICEF 2007).

Taking their cue from the United Nations, countries, like India and Indonesia,

started implementing behavioral change programs in urban and rural areas to

complement structural interventions. However, behavioral change programs have run

into many obstacles on the ground (Hueso & Bell 2013; Engel & Susilo 2014; Galvin 2015).

Bureaucrats trained in constructing sanitation “hardware” did not have adequate training

in communicating “software” strategies to communities, and struggled with community

engagement, as seen in the Total Sanitation Campaign in India (Hueso & Bell 2013;

Center for Public Impact 2017). Further, behavioral change policies, like the prominent

Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) program, have often had unintended negative

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social consequences for individuals and communities.5 For instance, Engel & Susilo

(2014) question the program’s emphasis on using shaming as a trigger to encourage

behavioral change without explicitly addressing structural and governance failures in

Indonesia.6 The authors also describe how the use of coercion by implementers external

to the area has reinforced and exacerbated intra-community hierarchies in their study

(Engel & Susilo 2014). Similarly, Galvin (2015) explores the erosion of human rights and

individual dignity in CLTS implementation, when the achievement of the goal of ending

open defecation is more important than the means to the end. While behavioral change

policies offer a more holistic way of tackling sanitation challenges, they need to be crafted

and implemented in a manner that responds to community needs and preferences

without condoning structural failures.

In solid waste management, “hardware” and “software” strategies have been more

intertwined. While attempting to expand decentralized waste management and

processing facilities, national and local governments have long emphasized the

importance of consumer behavior in waste disposal (World Bank 2018; UNEP & ISWA).

For example, national and local laws governing waste management include

environmental standards for waste management and disposal, and typically also describe

guidelines for households and businesses on the proper disposal of waste (World Bank

2018). In plastic waste management, for instance, interventions often start at the

5 CLTS is the dominant behavioral change framework in sanitation, pioneered by Kar & Chambers (2008). Primarily implemented in rural areas, CLTS utilizes public shaming and community pressure to induce healthy sanitation habits. For detailed case studies on the social impact of CLTS at the community level, see: Engel & Susilo (2014); Galvin (2015); and Bardosh (2015). 6 Interestingly, some of the sanitation NGOs I talked to who work in rural and urban areas said that while they use the CLTS framework, they choose not to employ shaming as a trigger for behavioral change. The CEO of Gramalaya, Mr. Sai Damodaran, noted that his organization prefers to use tools of positive reinforcement, like showing communities examples of best practices in similar areas (Interview at Gramalaya Headquarters, Trichy. Sep 5, 2018).

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household or commercial level to raise awareness and create habit change (World Bank

2018). Social networks are leveraged in behavioral change campaigns and community

leaders are tasked to spread awareness of healthy solid waste management habits, like the

Environmental Wardens in Jamaica, who are employed by the country’s National Solid

Waste Management Authority (World Bank 2018). These wardens are tasked with

enforcing environmental laws in their neighborhoods, and are trained in solid waste

management best practices and the prevention of environmental pollution (World Bank

2018).

Along with the expansion of the range of sanitation interventions, the number of

actors has also increased in the delivery of public sanitation. In concert with bureaucratic

agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become prominent in improving

sanitation “hardware” and “software” in in the Global South, as a response to the public

sector’s inability to provide high quality service coverage in cities (UNDP 2006; Ayee &

Crook 2003; Glasbergen et al. 2007). In particular, NGOs have undertaken most of the

responsibility for behavioral change efforts, given the close ties they share with the

communities they serve (Center for Policy Impact 2017; Pervaiz et al. 2008). Despite the

plethora of actors, coordination between them to improve sanitation outcomes remains a

challenge. For example, it is often difficult in Indian cities to articulate which agency

should assume responsibility for sanitation in slums or informal settlements, which often

leads to stasis (Connors 2005; Connors 2007; Pervaiz et al. 2008). Further, scaling up of

bottom-up efforts depends on the strength of horizontal ties in community groups and

their vertical relationships to decision-makers in water and sanitation agencies (Das

2015; Pervaiz et al. 2008).

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In solid waste management, governments struggle with clearly articulating

responsibilities among agencies since its activities cut across departments and

bureaucracies (World Bank 2018; UNEP & ISWA). Further, the informal sector in solid

waste is often separate from formal waste services in cities, resulting in gaps in service

provision and depriving informal workers of a sustainable livelihood (World Bank 2018).

Efforts to address coordination in solid waste management include the creation of

agencies dedicated to coordination between cities and bureaucracies, like the Sindh Solid

Waste Management Board in Pakistan, and the establishment of knowledge management

systems to collect and exchange data and best practices from the national and local levels,

like in Japan (World Bank 2018). However, these coordination mechanisms are more

exceptions than norms (World Bank 2018). Despite the multitude of interventions and

actors, urban sanitation remains an intractable challenge.

1.2 Sanitation in India: Toilets, Trash, and Bollywood

Why India?

In my dissertation, I explore urban sanitation governance in India, which

introduced the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission (SBM) in 2014 to address both

structural and behavioral obstacles in sanitation. The flagship policy of the national

government, SBM has promised to end open defecation and improve solid waste

management in the country with an unprecedented combination of political will at the

highest echelons, financing, and a massive, multi-faceted public communications

initiative that leverages social media and incorporates elements of drama and

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competition to spark a social “revolution.”7 In the global sanitation community that is and

has often felt neglected as water’s homely sidekick, SBM is an anomaly.

Urban Sanitation Governance in India

SBM hopes to solve India’s sanitation crisis, and builds on a series of national-level

policies and investments. The state of urban environmental sanitation in India is dire

(IIHS 2014; Wankhade 2015; Chaplin 1999; Chaplin 2011; WSP 2011; World Bank 2018).

According to the 2011 Census, 31.16% (377 million) of the country’s 1.21 billion people live

in urban areas (IIHS 2014). Among urban Indian households, 81% have toilets within

their houses, 6% have access to public toilets, and 12% (roughly 10 million) openly

defecate (IIHS 2014; Coffey et al. 2014). The country also generates 100,000 tons of

municipal solid waste per day; 83% of this waste is collected and only 30% is treated (Park

& Singh 2018). Despite the tremendous and growing need for urban environmental

sanitation infrastructure and services across the solid waste management and sanitation

value chains, from capture and containment to transport, treatment, and reuse/disposal,

there is an acute gap in both “hardware” and “software” services in Indian cities (TNUSSP

2016; World Bank 2018). These details paint a sobering picture of urban environmental

sanitation in India that is simultaneously a public health and environmental disaster.

Besides these constraints, India also faces labor and human rights challenges in

the sanitation sector; manual scavenging still persists despite the laws and policies

specifically prohibiting it (Doron & Jeffrey 2018; SBM Manual 2017). Manual scavenging

is the practice of forcing individuals from certain lower castes to clear human waste from

toilets and septic tanks, largely without adequate pay, technology, and protective gear

7 Interview with Mr. Prasanth, social entrepreneur in waste, No Dumping, ASLRM. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018; Interview with Mr. Nirmal Kumar Singh, Sulabh International. Chennai, Dec 4, 2018.

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(Singh & Singh 2019). It is related to Hindu notions of purity and pollution which are then

mapped on to social groups. The upper castes are considered to be purer than the lower

castes, and thus do not engage in “dirty” activities that involve the cleaning up of human

waste (Gupta et al. 2016). Manual scavengers largely belong to the Dalit or Untouchable

community, and continue to service insanitary latrines even in 21st century India.

A recent survey done by the Indian government estimated that more than 40,000

manual scavengers exist in the country across 14 states, and 70 percent of them are

women (Mishra 2019). One of the biggest human rights challenges in India is the frequent

deaths of those engaged in manual scavenging as a result of their efforts to clean up sewers

and septic tanks with no machinery or protective equipment. 620 cases have been

reported from 1993 to 2019, and many manual scavenger deaths go unreported (Nath

2019). In addition to the physical risks manual scavengers face, they are permanently

locked into this line of work because of caste-based stigma that prevent them and future

generations from pursuing alternative livelihoods (Nath 2019).

In my dissertation, I focus on the institutions in urban sanitation provision. One

of the primary reasons for poor access to environmental sanitation services in Indian

cities is the fragmented landscape of water and sanitation governance, particularly for the

urban poor (Das 2015; Connors 2005; Connors 2007; TNUSSP 2018). The 74th

Amendment in the Indian Constitution decentralized basic urban service provision in the

1990s, including water and sanitation, to urban local bodies (ULBs) to increase the

efficiency of resource allocation through the enhancement of relationships between

citizens, bureaucrats, and political representatives on the ground (Das 2015). In

operationalizing the gargantuan task of providing basic services for cities that are spatially

and socioeconomically diverse, state governments set up highly specialized agencies

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dedicated to different facets of urban services (Connors 2005; TNUSSP 2018; Bach &

Wegrich 2019). For example, in very large cities in India, separate water and sanitation

utilities are in charge of water supply and sewerage systems, while municipal corporations

oversee stormwater drains and solid waste management, among other infrastructure

services (Connors 2005; TNUSSP 2018). Water and sanitation access for the urban poor

and slum dwellers is even more complex with the involvement of additional agencies, like

the state slum clearance boards and city planning agencies (Connors 2005; Connors

2007).

This state of fractured governance, along with weak bureaucratic capacity and a

lack of political will and funds dedicated to urban sanitation improvements, has created

a substantial void in sanitation services, which is often filled by NGOs (Das 2015; Winters

et al. 2014). Prominent NGOs, like Sulabh International, Arghyam, Gramalaya, and

Chintan, have stepped up to provide both “hardware” and “software” services, particularly

in underserved areas. Sulabh International, headquartered in New Delhi, has been

working on improving human rights and access to environmental sanitation services

across the country since 1970. Arghyam emphasizes community-driven solutions to water

and sanitation challenges, and hosts the India Water Portal, a knowledge database for

water and sanitation research and data. Gramalaya, based in Trichy, has been focusing on

delivering “hardware” and “software” sanitation interventions to urban slums and villages

in the area for over thirty years. Finally, Chintan is a research and action group

specializing in environmental sustainability, including solid waste management

interventions.

Relationships between NGOs and municipal corporations and other water and

sanitation agencies have been checkered over time, particularly due to the rising

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popularity of private-public partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure projects in the last two

decades (Das 2015). The public sector in Indian cities has drifted away from partnerships

with NGOs in favor of courting the private sector for sponsorships and corporate social

responsibility (CSR) funds (Dutta 2017). The Reserve Bank of India noted that the

number of PPPs in energy, telecommunications, transportation, and water and sewerage

has increased from 1 in 1990 to 60 in 2006 (RBI). Further, special purpose vehicles

(SPVs), like the Smart Cities Mission, have emerged in the urban infrastructure sector to

leverage private capital for public benefit under the auspices of the central government,

and are envisioned as complementary to the public sector. Thus, the water and sanitation

landscape of Indian cities is populated with a number of distinct agencies and

organizations at varying levels of government, all with different agendas and priorities.

Coordination between these actors is a problem on the ground in the water and

sanitation sector. In her work, Connors (2005; 2007) describes how water provision for

the urban poor in Bangalore come under the purview of the water utility, the slum

clearance board, and the municipal corporation, which obfuscates the distinct

responsibilities of each agency and produces poor service standards. Further, her

research illustrates how “elite NGOs” in the city pressured public agencies for better

services by leveraging the Right to Information Act and using high-quality data analysis

to emphasize gaps in performance (Connors 2007).8 Similarly, in neighboring Pakistan,

NGOs have generated information relevant to public agencies’ mandates to encourage

them to improve services in underserved communities. Bureaucracies may not have up-

to-date or granular enough knowledge about these communities, hindering service

8 NGOs founded by high-level professionals and scholars to transform civic participation and urban governance in India, unlike grassroots NGOs (Connors 2007).

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provision. The best-known example of this is the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in Karachi,

which has produced detailed maps on sewer lines in the city’s informal settlements to

scale up community-level sanitation efforts with the help of the public sector. (Pervaiz et

al. 2008; Hasan 2006). Unlike the “elite” Bangalore NGOs, the OPP is a community-

driven organization, supported by social scientists and researchers trained in sanitation

construction and mapping. The OPP’s success in Karachi has been replicated in other

areas to varying degrees, depending on the level of interest and involvement from

implementing communities and agencies (Pervaiz et al. 2008).

Until the introduction of SBM, India’s approach to urban sanitation has mainly

focused on “hardware”, and behavioral change efforts have been more common in rural

interventions, like in the Total Sanitation Campaign. In the urban sphere, “software”

initiatives have been piecemeal and spearheaded by a variety of international and sub-

national actors. For example, NGOs working in Mumbai slums have organized “toilet

festivals,” with the assistance of the World Bank, to reframe the humiliation associated

with poor sanitation as a source of technological innovation (Appadurai 2001; McGeough

2013). Further, street plays, a cornerstone in public communication efforts in sanitation,

education, and hygiene in villages, have grown in popularity in cities as an effective

platform for sanitation outreach, with the support of municipal corporations and local

and national corporate sponsors (Sekar & Sinha 2015). While the National Urban

Sanitation Policy in 2008 emphasized the need for both “hardware” and “software”

interventions to tackle environmental sanitation challenges in the country, behavioral

change initiatives did not become a linchpin in urban sanitation implementation until

SBM.

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Solid waste management efforts in Indian cities have similarly been disjointed

until SBM. In 2000, the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change issued

municipal solid waste rules for cities to provide a legal framework for waste collection,

segregation, transportation, processing, and disposal, based on the recommendations of

a Supreme-Court-appointed committee (Ministry of Environment and Forests 2000;

Sambyal 2018; Pandey 2018). However, cities did not have the infrastructure or in-house

capacity to implement these rules, and struggled to cope with burgeoning solid waste as

a result of increasing urbanization (Sambyal 2018; Lahiri 2019). Municipal corporations

are unable to keep up with the demands of door-to-door garbage collection, and waste is

often haphazardly dumped outside cities and in waterbodies because of a lack of

processing and treatment facilities (Kumar et al., 2017; Pandey 2018). Further, the

informal sector, which is made up of waste pickers who collect and sell trash from streets

and landfills, is unintegrated with formal management systems (Gupta & Gupta 2015).

Different cities have attempted various initiatives to tackle solid waste. The

municipal corporation in Chandigarh, for instance, entered into a private-public

partnership with the Jaypee Group of New Delhi to construct a solid waste processing

plant in 2008 (Gupta & Gupta 2015). The city also advised bulk generators like malls,

colleges, and hospitals to take responsibility for segregating and processing organic waste,

and started issuing fines for violators of the solid waste management rules since 2013

(Gupta & Gupta 2015). Similarly, in Mysore, the Federation of Mysuru City Corporation

Wards Parliament, a local NGO, runs zero-waste processing plants for half the city’s one

million residents (Chatterjee 2016). In partnership with the city corporation that

implemented door-to-door collection of solid waste before SBM, the NGO segregates,

labels, and sells trash to scrap merchants (Chatterjee 2016). While cities have attempted

20

to address solid waste management independently, the issue has not been nationally

addressed. It was included as part of the environmental sanitation sector within the

National Urban Sanitation policy, but this was never implemented.

Key Urban Sanitation Interventions Before 2014

Recognizing the severity of the sanitation crisis, the Indian government launched

several initiatives to improve outcomes in the country, although institutional reform has

not been their main focus (Center for Public Impact 2017; SBM Manual 2017). While SBM

is India’s most recent and heavily publicized attempt at overhauling sanitation, the policy

stands on the shoulders of three giants in India’s sanitation history: the rural Total

Sanitation Campaign (TSC), the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission

(JNNURM), and the National Urban Sanitation Policy. Table 1 summarizes the key

features of all four policies:

Total Sanitation Campaign

JNNURM National Urban Sanitation Policy

Swachh Bharat Mission

Year Launched 1999 2005 2008 2014 Urban/Rural Rural Urban Urban Rural & Urban Main Goals Integrate behavioral

change; End open defecation

Urban development; Governance reform

Institutional reform; City-wide sanitation planning; Environmental sanitation approach

End open defecation; Improve solid waste management

Role of NGOs in Sanitation

Supporting role in implementation

Watchdogs for public agencies

Supporting role in implementation

Key implementing partners

Public Communication Efforts

Rankings; media campaigns

None Rankings Rankings; media and social media campaigns; Bollywood movies

Table 1: Milestones in India’s urban sanitation history

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Launched in 1999, TSC was India’s first sanitation policy to integrate both

“software” and “hardware” interventions in rural areas (Center for Public Impact 2017).

It was also the first policy to draw attention to the importance of bureaucracies in

sanitation because of its highly public implementation challenges (Chattopadhyay 2015;

Hueso & Bell 2013; Center for Public Impact 2017). The primary reason for the failure of

TSC was the lack of coordination between and across government agencies and local

bodies, which proved doubly problematic because the campaign was a major departure

from previous supply- and subsidy-oriented rural sanitation programs (Center for Public

Impact 2017). Therefore, the alignment of goals and strategies between the national,

district, and sub-district levels did not occur, and many frontline bureaucrats were unable

to adapt to the new combined “software” and “hardware” approach to implementation

that involved greater community participation (Center of Public Impact 2017; Hueso &

Bell 2013). While NGOs were recognized for their “special” role in helping to mobilize

communities for sanitation improvements, they were not considered to be crucial

partners to the implementing bureaucracies (Center for Public Impact 2017). TSC, like

SBM, emphasized public communication (Center for Public Impact 2017). Villages were

publicly recognized and rewarded for achieving sanitation milestones, like eradicating

open defecation and improving solid waste management practices9 (Center for Public

Impact 2017). The TSC was one of the foundational policies SBM Urban and Rural were

based on; it was renamed the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, which eventually became SBM

Rural in 2014 (PIB 2014). Unfortunately, TSC did not effectively use the funds allocated

22

for behavioral change; a CAG (2015) report found that the funds were instead diverted

towards administrative expenses. Thus, behavioral change campaigns at the national level

did not get a meaningful push until SBM.

The next sanitation milestone was JNNURM in 2005, which was not a policy

dedicated to sanitation, but one that more generally sought to improve the quality of

infrastructure and governance in Indian cities and upgrade living conditions for the urban

poor (Wankhade 2015). Sanitation received 24% (US$ 2.5 billion) of the funding

dedicated to urban infrastructure and governance, which has been one of the largest

investments in urban sanitation (Wankhade 2015). These funds were mostly used to

retrofit or expand sewerage networks, and solid waste management was a sector eligible

for funding if municipal corporations had solid waste management projects they wanted

to implement (Wankhade 2015; PIB 2011). In addition to infrastructure improvements,

service level benchmarking and data collection were hallmarks of this program. The

government wanted to shift the focus from infrastructure investments to service delivery

outcomes, and a list of performance parameters for the urban water and sanitation sector

was drawn up to this end (MoUD 2010). This emphasis on service delivery and data

collection is echoed in SBM (Swachh Survekshan Toolkit 2018).

Besides improving urban infrastructure, JNNURM also emphasized the necessity

of governance reform, particularly in revising accounting practices and creating an e-

governance infrastructure, in parastatal agencies and urban local bodies to improve the

provision of basic services (“JNNURM Overview”). It tied these reforms to the access to

additional funds for cities and state governments to ensure compliance (Mahadevia 2011).

Further, this policy championed the PPP model of implementation, and did not consider

NGOs, resident welfare associations (RWAs), and other community partners as key

23

implementers (“JNNURM Overview;” MOHUPA 2011). Instead, this policy envisioned

the role of NGOs as watchdogs to keep public agencies accountable (MOHUPA 2011).

Unlike SBM and TSC, public communication was not a prominent part of JNNURM,

which was envisioned solely as a policy aimed at upgrading urban infrastructure and

governance (MOHUPA 2011; “JNNURM Overview). Despite the ambitious goals of the

policy, a 2012 CAG report eviscerated its implementation, critiquing the central

government’s inability to monitor outcomes and release funds on time to states. Further,

the country’s preeminent auditor found that some of the funds were diverted to “ineligible

beneficiaries” and that mandated third party inspections had not occurred on the ground

(CAG 2012). In addition, Wankhade (2013) corroborated the results from the CAG (2012)

report and declared that the lack of inter-sectoral planning and bureaucratic

noncoordination hampered capacity building in ULBs, particularly in water and

sanitation provision.

The third giant in India’s urban sanitation history is the National Urban Sanitation

Policy, which was launched in 2008, the International Year of Sanitation as declared by

the United Nations. This policy was unusual because its focus was exclusively on

sanitation and it had no urban water counterpart (Wankhade 2015; MoUD 2014). Unlike

JNNURM, it welcomed all types of interventions from states and cities, not just specific

“hardware” solutions like sewerage systems (Wankhade 2015; MoUD 2014). The policy

specified a comprehensive environmental sanitation approach, outlining interventions to

increase toilet production and adoption and to improve solid waste management (MoUD

2014). The urban poor were also at the heart of this policy, and it called for the uncoupling

of tenure status and service provision to expand formal service provision in poor areas

(Wankhade 2015; MoUD 2014). Institutional reform to achieve these goals was an explicit

24

goal of this policy, which highlighted coordination as a significant obstacle to urban

sanitation planning in Indian cities (MoUD 2014). This policy advised cities and state

governments to create multi-stakeholder city sanitation task forces to carry out policy

implementation, and invited state governments and ULBs to oversee coordination with

other agencies, NGOs, and community groups involved in urban sanitation efforts,

especially in areas with slum dwellers and the urban poor (MoUD 2014). While this policy

remains a visionary document in advocating for context-sensitive, city-wide sanitation

planning combining both “hardware” and “software” as needed, the lack of explicit

funding resulted in no major interventions associated with it in cities (Wankhade 2015;

Leavens 2010). However, it continues to be influential in subsequent state- and city-level

urban sanitation planning (Wankhade 2015). The National Urban Sanitation Policy

taught SBM the value of providing national funding for sanitation efforts, beyond

planning and technical assistance, to encourage implementation at the state and city

levels.

Similar to SBM, this policy also conducted city rankings, although the purpose was

different. The National Advisory Board for Urban Sanitation (part of the Ministry of

Urban Development) ranked cities on different measures of environmental sanitation as

a technical resource for ULBs to help them identify their baseline needs and performance

improvements if the policy was implemented; it was not primarily envisioned as a strategy

to increase the visibility of sanitation challenges and interventions for citizens (WSP 2011;

SBM website). According to Mr. Somnath Sen, an advisor for institutional development

and strategy with experience working on this policy, it was an effort implemented by

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s technocratic administration that focused on

expanding sanitation interventions in India beyond the construction of toilets and sewage

25

treatment plants.10 While rigorous in nature about improving urban sanitation, it lacked

the “filmy” quality that has made SBM so attractive with citizens, politicians, and

bureaucrats.11

The Swachh Bharat Mission

In 2014, SBM was announced with much fanfare. Prime Minister Narendra Modi,

who ran and won on a sanitation-focused platform, declared that the policy will help India

eradicate open defecation by October 2019, in time to honor Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th

birthday. SBM is part of the Modi government’s strategy to turn Indian cities into engines

of economic growth through upgrading urban infrastructure (Tewari et al. 2016; Jha &

Udas-Mankikar 2019). In addition to SBM, the Smart Cities Mission and the Atal Mission

for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) were also launched in 2015 to this

end (Jha & Udas-Mankikar 2019; Smart Cities website; AMRUT website).12 The scale,

visibility, and political buy-in at the highest echelons of power in SBM is unprecedented,

both in India and in the universe of sanitation, which has felt “unloved” (George 2008, p.

123).13

In updating previous efforts at addressing sanitation, SBM encourages a broad

approach to environmental sanitation using a combination of both “hardware” and

“software” interventions (SBM website). SBM policy guidelines and its advertising

campaigns explicitly highlight that making India clean is a shared social responsibility,

and that sanitation improvements cannot be accomplished through government efforts

alone (SBM Manual 2017; SBM Facebook page). The policy thus highlights the

10 Phone interview with Mr Somnath Sen. Chennai, December 14, 2018. 11 Ibid. 12 AMRUT is the updated form of JNNURM. 13 SBM is also India’s first national effort to simultaneously address both urban and rural sanitation needs.

26

importance of community actors like NGOs and RWAs, along with conventional

implementers like government agencies and municipal corporations (SBM website; SBM

Manual 2017). ULBs are still considered the main implementer of SBM, and are expected

to coordinate activities with other key implementers (SBM Manual 2017). While

institutional reform in sanitation governance is not explicitly stated as a goal of SBM or

Swachh Survekshan, the indicators for rankings clearly assume coordination between

agencies and between agencies and NGOs to fulfil the criteria. For example, in the toilet

construction indicators, the Swachh Survekshan Toolkit directs ULBs to also ensure

constant water supply to the latrines, which may or may not fall under the purview of the

agency, depending on the city. Further, the beautification of slums, another indicator,

does not specify coordination between ULBs and the state slum clearance boards to

achieve this goal but assumes it (Swachh Survekshan Toolkit 2018).

While SBM asserts the importance of different types of stakeholders in achieving a

clean India, it also emphasizes accountability and transparency of local governments and

service providers through documentation, data-based governance, and improved

communication between agencies and citizens (SBM website). To this end, SBM has

introduced the Swachhata app, which is a mobile app that provides a platform for the

public to report sanitation-related complaints in their neighborhoods for the municipal

corporations to resolve. SBM has also implemented Swachh Survekshan, an annual

survey and ranking of cities, which started in 2016. Swachh Survekshan relies on data

provided by municipal corporations, data from direct observation by third-party

verification teams, and citizen feedback (Swachh Survekshan 2018 Toolkit). In 2018,

service level progress counted for 35% of the total number of marks, direct observation

was 30%, and citizen feedback was 35% (Swachh Survekshan 2018 Toolkit). The service-

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level progress indicators evaluate a city’s open-defecation-free (ODF) status, solid waste

management practices, “software” strategies, capacity building, and innovation around

service delivery and behavioral change (Swachh Survekshan 2018 Toolkit). The citizen

feedback component emphasizes the importance of public communication of SBM from

the nodal agency to the public (SBM website).14 Cities can also obtain awards and

certifications under Swachh Survekshan, like “India’s Best City in Innovation and Best

Practices,” “ODF+,” and “7-Star Rating for Garbage-Free Cities.” A list of all the indicators

from the recent Swachh Survekshan 2019 are available in Appendix C. Cities and citizens

have become acutely aware of these rewards, rankings, and certifications that have

become the face of SBM on the ground.

In addition to the Swachhata app and Swachh Survekshan, SBM has initiated a

wave of media and social media campaigns in multiple languages to create awareness and

behavioral change around sanitation and hygiene across the country.15 A television series

called Navrangi Re! to raise awareness on the importance of fecal sludge management

aired in February 2019, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and

Media Action (Minhas 2019).16 The two organizations also helped the Indian government

launch a Hindi radio series on behavioral change in 2017 and produced five short films

highlighting innovation in local public communication and waste management efforts

(BBC Media Action). On social media, Indian celebrities like actor Amitabh Bachchan and

14 The citizen feedback part consists of six questions for residents about SBM and their perceptions on improvements in environmental sanitation in their neighborhood in the last year. It also includes data from the Swachhata app on the number of downloads and the percentage of complaints timely resolved (Swachh Survekshan 2018 Report) 15 The use of social media is particularly associated with SBM because it is one of India’s first national policies implemented in the age of social media by a ruling political party (the Bharatiya Janata Party or the BJP) that is known for its success in leveraging technology and social media to “organize online for success offline” in the 2014 elections (Jha 2017). 16 The literal translation of Navrangi Re is “nine colors.”

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cricket player Sachin Tendulkar are using their online fan base to communicate the

urgency of sanitation challenges, knowledge about SBM’s initiatives, and the public’s

responsibility to enthusiastically participate in this sanitation movement. In these

outreach efforts, SBM skillfully invokes references to Gandhi to appeal to the emotions of

the Indian public. SBM uses Gandhi’s glasses as its logo, has set the deadline for an open-

defecation-free India on his 150th birthday, and has framed many of its advertising

campaigns around his writings on sanitation (SBM website; SBM Facebook page;

“Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi”). Besides the political value the central

government derives from its alignment with him, the use of Gandhi as a marketing tool

for SBM is a shrewd move; he is a (mostly) beloved and familiar figure in Indian society,

cutting across geographical, caste, and class divisions. Combining the relatively universal

appeal of Gandhi with contemporary Indian celebrities in television and social media

campaigns makes the messaging of SBM more attractive to citizens.

The Bollywood movie industry has also embraced SBM, firmly entrenching

sanitation in the Indian cultural imaginary. Toilet: A Love Story was released in 2017 and

Pad Man was released in 2018, both starring well-known Bollywood actor, Akshay

Kumar, in sanitation-centric roles. Toilet: A Love Story (2017) is a romantic comedy

about a man in an Indian village whose wife leaves him because his house does not have

a toilet. In the same vein, Pad Man (2018) depicts the real-life story of an Indian

entrepreneur in Coimbatore who started manufacturing low-cost sanitary pads to address

menstrual hygiene problems and taboos in the country. This marriage of Bollywood,

Gandhi, and city rankings has rendered SBM a highly prominent policy in India,

compared to previous sanitation efforts.

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1.3 Research Question

SBM implicitly speaks to coordination in its ambitious goal to improve all aspects

of urban sanitation, from ending open defecation to implementing door-to-door garbage

services to slum beautification projects (SBM website; SBM Manual 2017; Swachh

Survekshan Toolkit 2018). City bureaucracies are at the forefront of this movement, and

are expected to coordinate between themselves and with NGOs to implement SBM (SBM

Manual 2017). SBM’s public communication efforts, like the rankings, certifications, and

the app, present agencies with opportunities to improve their reputation with different

audiences, from the public, state and central governments, to international financial

organizations.17

I explore the relationships between organizational reputation and bureaucratic

coordination in sanitation in the context of Tamil Nadu, a South Indian state. Tamil Nadu

is the most urbanized state in India, and has focused its sanitation efforts on building

“hardware” before the introduction of SBM. Since 2016, the state has incorporated

“software” strategies. Within Tamil Nadu, I focus on Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy.

These cities have emerged as the top three in the state in the Swachh Survekshan 2018

rankings, which suggests that they have been actively using some or all of the SBM

reputational tools.18 I chose variation in cases according to where sanitation services are

coordinated entirely within government and where sanitation services require

coordination between government and other actors. Chennai is an example of public

17 Agencies are also expected to coordinate with community-based organizations and RWAs. I focus on service providers, and only examine NGOs in my study. 18 Trichy was 13th, Coimbatore was 16th, and Chennai was 100th out of 471 large cities in India in 2018 (Swachh Survekshan website). Erode came in at 51 but it is a smaller city compared to the other three. I focus on large cities in my study.

30

sector dominance in sanitation provision. In Coimbatore and Trichy, NGOs and

municipal corporations work in the sanitation sector.

The existing literature on coordination has identified five factors: bureaucratic

capacity, administrative coherence, bureaucratic autonomy, the ability of NGOs to share

expertise, and civic participation. However, the literature ignores the potential effects of

organizational reputation on coordination between agencies and between agencies and

NGOs. During my preliminary fieldwork in Tamil Nadu, I was struck by how different

stakeholders in environmental sanitation, including bureaucrats, referred to the

reputations of various agencies as opposed to their mandates. Agencies were frequently

described as corrupt, under the influence of a particular politician, or a “black box” to

indicate the lack of transparency in decision-making. For instance, a participant at the

CAG workshop on rethinking urbanization referred to the Chennai Metropolitan

Development Authority as “incoherent,” noting the agency’s haphazard efforts at city

planning.19 Further, Senior Bureaucrat A, who is familiar with SBM implementation in

Chennai, mentioned that it would be difficult to coordinate with Chennai Metro Water,

the water and sewerage utility in the city, because the beleaguered agency needs to take

care of its many problems before it can look outwards.20 In this context, what impacts

coordination between agencies and between agencies and NGOs? Do the

reputational devices offered by SBM impact coordination? If so, under what

conditions? While bureaucratic coordination has been well-studied in several sectors

and even within India, it has not been the focus of scholarship in sanitation. Further,

19 Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group (CAG) Workshop. Rethinking Urbanization and Right to the City. Chennai, Oct 2, 2018. 20 Interview with Senior Bureaucrat A. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018.

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despite the explicit leveraging of reputational devices in SBM, the effects of organizational

reputation on coordination have not been adequately explored.

1.4 Reviewing the Literature on Bureaucratic Coordination

Bureaucracies in a decentralized society divide the labor of government on the

ground through specialization and delegation to improve resource allocation and service

provision at the most local level. A result of this specialization is that bureaucracies

dedicated to service provision have narrow and specific mandates (Bach and Wegrich

2019). Scholars argue that the negative implications of this is that cross-cutting policies

may not be effectively implemented because of departmental boundaries (Bach and

Wegrich 2019). In addition to administrative silos, factors that complicate the

implementation of complex policies include capacity levels in agencies, administrative

coherence, and bureaucratic autonomy, particularly in the Global South. Further, factors

that impact coordination between agencies and NGOs include the ability of NGOs to share

data and expertise with bureaucracies to help them fulfill their mandate and civic

participation.

Bureaucratic Capacity

Bureaucracies in the global South operate under severe resource-constrained

settings, and often lack adequate access to financial and human resources and trainings

to effectively carry out their work (Heims 2019; Pritchett et al. 2010). Therefore,

coordination is a “peripheral task” for bureaucracies because it is an additional task

outside their organizational mandate (Heims 2019, p. 115). SBM, for example, asks ULBs

to implement its expansive vision of urban sanitation in addition to their daily work, and

to coordinate with and oversee a host of organizations from NGOs to city planning

32

agencies and slum clearance boards (SBM Manual 2017). Pritchett et al. (2010) term this

phenomenon of not recognizing and addressing bureaucratic constraints in policy

implementation as the “Asking Too Much of Too Little Too Soon Too Often” syndrome.

Andrews et al. (2017) also point to isomorphic mimicry in agencies of the Global South,

where form and function are conflated. These scholars argue that the appearance of

carrying out a task, like passing a law, is counted as a win, even if the law is not actually

enforced (Andrews et al. 2017). When bureaucracies are trapped in an environment of

isomorphic mimicry, existing strategies for organizational development, like training and

compliance, have little effect on transforming bureaucratic capacity (Andrews et al. 2017).

If organizations are unable to even fulfill their own mandate, it is unlikely that they will

turn their attention to coordination with other agencies.

Further, in India, Pritchett (2014) describes how bureaucracies are designed to

carry out “thin” tasks over “thick” tasks. In his study of the Indian educational system,

Pritchett (2014) argues that agencies are largely built to implement “thin” logistical tasks,

like running a post office, and are used to being evaluated with “thin” criteria: has the

letter been delivered? However, bureaucracies in the 21st century need to perform “thick”

tasks that are transaction-intensive and require expertise and discretion in decision-

making (Pritchett 2014). Sanitation is an example of a “thick” sector that cannot be

improved or measured with “thin” indicators. For instance, improving sanitation

outcomes is more than constructing toilets and checking them off when they are built. It

requires bureaucrats to work with other agencies, communities, and NGOs to figure out

if these toilets are being used in the long run and if they are accessible to all members of

the community.

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Administrative Coherence

In addition to bureaucratic capacity, administrative coherence is essential in inter-

agency coordination. Evans (1995) describes embedded autonomy as a set of diverse

relationships between the developmental state and significant social and private sector

groups to transform society. Chibber (2002) applies this to the Indian context and argues

that while an effective bureaucracy with ties to social groups and the private sector is

necessary, it is also imperative that relationships between agencies need to be first

established to distribute power accordingly. He compares the developmental states of

India and South Korea and highlights how in the South Korean case, economic planners

had the power to discipline other state agencies, which led to administrative coherence

(Chibber 2002). In post-independence India, the Planning Commission was initiated at

the national level to act as a coordinating agency between different ministries in the

formulation, implementation, and evaluation of industrial policy (Chibber 2002).

However, there was no system set up to share information between the ministries and the

Commission, and the ministries resisted transmitting information since they viewed it as

a loss of their autonomy (Chibber 2002). The Commission also did not have the authority

to demand compliance beyond sending ministries repeated requests for information

(Chibber 2002). In contrast, in Korea, the Economic Planning Board was endowed with

the authority to discipline ministries, which adapted their functioning around the

coordinating agency (Chibber 2002). Thus, Korea was able to implement industrial policy

in a cohesive manner, and India’s developmental dreams were dashed by bureaucratic

incoherence (Chibber 2002).

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Bureaucratic Autonomy

Bureaucracies are political actors, and they often serve at the pleasure of

politicians, compromising their autonomy (Bach & Wegrich 2019; Iyer & Mani 2007).

Water and environmental sanitation agencies are not immune to the vagaries of local and

state politics, and the organizations’ priorities may be co-opted for better or worse by high

ranking bureaucrats and politicians. Iyer and Mani (2012) illustrate the tension between

political and professional productivity, using the example of how junior Indian

bureaucrats choose to pursue political loyalty over productivity for career development.

Further, Iyer and Mani (2007) use a 2005 dataset on the career histories of officers in the

Indian Administrative Service to determine if bureaucrats were transferred more

frequently than normal, and the reasons for these transfers. The authors found that

politicians wield some power over bureaucratic assignments, choosing to reward

bureaucrats loyal to them with prized positions, and assigning punishment posts to their

opponents (Iyer & Mani 2007). Tamil Nadu politicians, particularly the erstwhile Mr. M.

Karunanidhi and Ms. J. Jayalalithaa who took turns as Chief Ministers for the Dravida

Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam

(AIADMK) respectively, are well known for their manipulation of state and city

bureaucracies bureaucracies (Mehar 2017; Dharmaraj 2014; Times of India 2013). For

instance, the Commissioner at the Coimbatore Corporation was unceremoniously

transferred in 2014 after one and a half years at her post because she authorized the

shutdown of a building that was constructed without proper permits, which was owned

by the granddaughter of Mr. Karunanidhi (Dharmaraj 2014; Times of India 2013). Undue

political interference in the bureaucracy thus constrains its ability to make its own

decisions, including the decision to coordinate or not.

35

Relevance of NGO Expertise in Agency-NGO Coordination In response to increasing demand for service provision in the global South, NGOs

have emerged to fill the void and their importance as service providers is growing (Lewis

& Kanji 2009; Najam 2000; Ayee & Crook 2003). There are four models of NGO

involvement in service provision: complements to the state and private sector, partners

with state and private sector, substitutes for the state and private sector, and ‘cocooning’

(Najam 2000; Lewis & Kanji 2009; Pritchett et al. 2010). Pritchett et al. (2010) use

‘cocooning’ to emphasize how NGOs often work in parallel to bureaucracies and are

successful at the project-level but are unable to scale up due to limited bureaucratic

capacity that prevent implementing NGO models for a larger population. Partnerships

between NGOs and the public and private sectors are heralded as the best way to provide

services at levels higher than private-public partnerships (UNDP 2006; Ayee & Crook

2003; Glasbergen et al. 2007).

One of the major incentives for the public sector to coordinate with NGOs is the

ability of NGOs to share crucial data, knowledge, and expertise with agencies to help them

fulfill their core mission (Pervaiz et al. 2008;). The Orangi Pilot Project’s (OPP) work in

Karachi, Pakistan with the water and sanitation agency, illustrates the importance of this

ability. The OPP, one of the best-known examples of community-driven urban sanitation,

is an NGO that is helping residents in Orangi and other informal areas in Pakistan build

low-cost “internal” sanitation infrastructure, like household latrines and underground

sewers (Pervaiz et al. 2008; Hasan 2006). The OPP relies on residents to organize

themselves and finance the construction, and provides maps and plans, estimates for

labor and supplies, and training to conduct the work (Pervaiz et al. 2008; Hasan 2006).

One of the NGO’s greatest accomplishments is the mapping of water and sanitation

36

infrastructure in informal areas in Karachi and in other Pakistani cities, which the

agencies did not have before (Pervaiz et al. 2008; Hasan 2006). Providing the Karachi

Metropolita Corporation (KMC) with data enabled the NGO in this case to then negotiate

with the agency to influence sanitation planning in informal settlements and to replicate

low-cost sanitation implementation in other areas (Pervaiz et al. 2008; Hasan 2006). The

OPP’s specialized knowledge of sanitation planning and implementation in informal

areas of Pakistani cities thus helped improve sanitation services and provided an avenue

for the NGO to coordinate with public agencies.

Civic Participation

Another factor identified by the empirical scholarship as an influence on how well

NGOs and bureaucracies work together for water and sanitation provision in Asia is the

importance of civic participation. Civic participation in this context refers to the existence

of democratic mechanisms for people to pressure local agencies for better services

(Winters et al. 2014). These mechanisms include electoral processes, civic education, and

community-based groups like NGOs. Weak demand for basic services can be attributed

to upper income class use of private arrangements, poor quality of public services,

expensive and inconvenient services, and cultural factors (e.g. education for girls not

prioritized in some communities) (Winters et al. 2014; WDR 2004). In Indonesia, low-

income residents may not want to pay for the cost of setting up new sewerage connections,

and upper income classes do not need to lobby the government for service provision since

they already would have private providers (Winters et al. 2014).

Citizens also need to be well informed to understand the links between basic

services and human flourishing, and to also learn how to effectively lobby the government

for better services (Winters et al. 2014; WDR 2004). For example, local governments in

37

Indian districts perform better at distributing disaster relief supplies in areas with higher

newspaper circulation (WDR 2004). In Uttar Pradesh, an Indian state with dismal human

development outcomes, citizens recognize that the quality of service provision is low but

do not know how to remedy the situation (WDR 2004). In addition to education, high

rates of civic activism help shape implementation since policies can galvanize existing

work on the ground, carried out by public agencies, NGOs, and CBOs (WDR 2004). In

Kerala, for example, its high human development outcomes can partly be attributed to

the society’s commitment to gender equality and anti-casteism (WDR 2004).

Connors (2005) illustrates how participatory governance by NGOs in Bangalore’s

water sector improved service provision. NGOs like the Public Affairs Centre, Civic

Bangalore, and Janaagraha were engaged in increasing the level of civic participation

during the period when the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board was slowly

embracing service delivery to slums (Connors 2005). These NGOs encouraged residents

to get involved in ward-level meetings, and in educating themselves on how different

government agencies worked, and provided performance report cards for various

agencies (Connors 2005). While these NGOs did not exclusively focus on improving living

conditions in slums, they made efforts to include slum dwellers in their meetings and

raised their issues in mainstream discourse (Connors 2005). These NGOs also regularly

attended public hearings and were in touch with senior officials at government agencies

and the media, which allowed them to gain popular support within Bangalore and beyond

(Connors 2005). In this climate of greater public participation with NGOs playing a

prominent role, the agency improved communication with residents through new

complaint monitoring systems and monthly forums at the sub-divisional level where

residents could discuss their water problems with each other and the area’s engineers

38

(Connors 2005). An engaged citizenry thus encouraged coordination between NGOs and

the agency in improving service provision.

1.5 Study Methods

Case Selection

To study this question on coordination, I focus on the South Indian state of Tamil

Nadu within India since my interest is in urban sanitation. According to the 2011 census,

this was the most urbanized state. From a feasibility standpoint, I am fluent in Tamil,

which was tremendously helpful in conducting interviews and developing relationships,

especially with mid-level bureaucrats and NGO leaders outside of Chennai.21 I examine

coordination in the three most politically and economically significant cities in the state:

Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy. These cities were also the top three in the state in the

2018 city rankings, and in the top 100 in India (Swachh Survekshan 2018). Chennai is the

capital city of Tamil Nadu and the financial capital of South India. The state bureaucracy

and politicians are located there. Coimbatore is known for its educational institutions and

entrepreneurship sector, and is a major manufacturing hub in the region (Smart Cities

Coimbatore). Similarly, Trichy is also a manufacturing hub, and a prominent Hindu

religious pilgrimage destination (Smart Cities Trichy). Thus, the three cities are sites of

economic and political power in the region. As a result, their municipal corporations have

more access to resources that would enable them to use the public communication tools

provided by SBM. As leading cities in the state and the region, the three cities also have

reputational incentives to perform well in SBM.

21 Tamil is my mother tongue, and I have formally studied it as my second language in primary and secondary school in Singapore.

39

While SBM advocates for an expansive environmental sanitation approach that

ranges from ending open defecation to fecal sludge management, I focus only on

“hardware” and “software” interventions aimed at improving toilet construction and

usage and solid waste management in my study. These are the two issues that received

the most attention in the three cities that I was studying from 2017 to 2019 (SBM website).

Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy differ institutionally in the urban sanitation sector,

which provides a rich set of data to examine both inter-agency and agency-NGO

dynamics. Chennai has a municipal corporation that is in charge of solid waste

management and stormwater drains, and Chennai Metro Water Supply and Sewage

Board (CMWSSB, colloquially known as Metro Water), the public utility, oversees water

supply and sewerage. In contrast, Trichy and Coimbatore both have municipal

corporations tasked with providing water and solid waste management services and

constructing sewers for the cities. The Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB) is the

state agency tasked with implementing improvements in slums across the state, which is

one of the goals of SBM (SBM Manual 2017; Swachh Survekshan Toolkit 2018). TNSCB

focuses on toilets. The NGO landscape also differs across the three cities. Chennai

currently has no major environmental sanitation NGOs that are service providers. In

Coimbatore, the numerous sanitation NGOs work in concert with one another in a

cohesive network and focus on building toilets and improving solid waste management.

On the other hand, in Trichy, there are two large NGOs which focus on expanding toilet

coverage.

Table 2 presents a summary of the key characteristics of the three cities. While they

differ in size and local political environments, I chose them because of the institutional

mix among the three cities around inter-agency and agency-NGO coordination. I am also

40

comparing three prominent cities in the same state implementing the same national

policy, which helps in minimizing drastic variations in politics and bureaucracies.

Chennai Coimbatore Trichy Population (2011) 4.6 million 1 million 850,000 Area (sq. km) 426 246.8 167.2 Solid waste generated (TPD)

4880 783 455

No. of hhs with insanitary latrines

2888 239 6936

No. of hhs with open defecation

6553 84 4273

Municipal corporation in charge of solid waste management and sewerage?

No; Metro Water in charge of sewerage

Yes Yes

Sanitation NGOs? No Yes Yes

Table 2: City profiles Sources: Census 2011; Smart Cities Trichy; Smart Cities Coimbatore; GCC website; SBM website

Overview of State and Local Politics

There are currently two major political parties in the state, both of which are

regional and not national. The current party in power is the All India Anna Dravida

Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). Ms. J. Jayalalithaa belonged to this party and was Chief

Minister of the state until her death in 2016. In 2011, she won in the Srirangam

constituency in the Trichy district. The current Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu is Mr.

Edappadi K. Palanisami. The main opposition party in the state, led by Mr. M.K. Stalin,

is the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).22 Mr. M. Karunanidhi, Mr. Stalin’s father,

was the leader of the DMK and also served as Chief Minister between 1969 and 2011. He

won in the Chepauk constituency in Chennai in 1996, 2001, and 2006 (India Today 2018).

22 Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam loosely translates into English as the Party for the Advancement of the Dravidian people.

41

For the 2019 national elections, AIADMK aligned itself with the Bharatiya Janata

Party (BJP), a move that was unpopular for many parts of the state. With its emphasis on

speaking the Hindi language and its championing of the Hindu nationalist agenda, the

BJP is unpopular in the state that is proud of its Tamil identity and language (Ramajayam

2019). Traditionally, the AIADMK has been perceived as the party associated with upper

caste South Indian Hindus, while the DMK is viewed as a party for Tamil people with

different caste and religious identities (Wyatt 2013; Ramajayam 2019). Further, the

AIADMK prides itself on its policies focusing on uplifting women and poor in the state,

especially with a female leader in power until 2016 (Wyatt 2013). The DMK too focuses

on the poor, but also caters to the needs of the socially vulnerable, which includes Dalits

and other lower caste communities (Wyatt 2013). The state is currently in a political

vacuum after the deaths of Ms. Jayalalithaa in 2016 and Mr. Karunanidhi in 2018.

The AIADMK has been popular in Trichy, partly due to Ms. Jayalalithaa’s personal

and political affiliation with the city. In the 2011 mayoral elections, an AIADMK

candidate, Ms. A. Jaya, was elected to serve until 2016 (Kumar 2016). Similarly,

Coimbatore’s last mayor was also from the AIADMK - Mr. Ganapathi P. Raj Kumar. Three

out of four mayors in Coimbatore since 2001 were from the AIADMK (The Hindu 2016).

In Chennai, the last two mayors were from the DMK (Mr. M. Subramaniam, 2006-2011)

and the AIADMK (Mr. Saidai Sa. Duraisamy, 2011-2016) (Ramakrishnan 2011). In the

absence of local elections since 2016, senior bureaucrats, often the commissioners of the

municipal corporations, have been designated as Special Officers. This lack of public

representatives attenuates the ability of citizens, community groups, and NGOs to

pressure agencies for better service provision under SBM. Further, ward councilors or

42

mayors who were previously policy champions for water and sanitation may not have the

clout to catalyze policy implementation on the ground.

Methods

In my study, I am first looking for evidence on what drives coordination or non-

coordination between agencies and between agencies and NGOs in SBM. Second, I am

investigating the potential effects of SBM’s reputational devices on coordination, if any,

and how these reputational tools interact with drivers of coordination. The dependent

variable is coordination. The dependent and independent variables are operationalized in

the following manner:

i. Coordination (dependent variable). Are there partnerships and collaborations

at various levels between agencies to implement SBM? Are there partnerships

and collaborations at various levels between municipal corporations and

NGOs?

1. Method 1: Semi-structured interviews with nodal officers, officials in

charge of information, education, and communication (IEC)

activities for SBM, officials in solid waste management and health

departments in the three municipal corporations.

• Example interview question: Do you collaborate with other

agencies to implement SBM? If so, which agencies (e.g.

CMWSSB, TNSCB, CMA etc.)? How long have you had this

relationship?

2. Method 2: Semi-structured interviews with NGO leaders and

participant observation of behavioral change campaigns to

determine nature and quality of collaborations, if any.

43

• Example interview questions: What would you say your

expertise is in - solid waste management, toilet building,

behavioral change, or a mixture of the above? Do you work

with the corporation to implement SBM? If so, what kinds of

activities do you work on together? How long have you had

this relationship?

3. Method 3: Document analysis of manuals on Swachh Survekshan

ranking and implementation methodologies.

• Question: How is bureaucratic coordination framed and

incentivized in the SBM policy documents and in Swachh

Survekshan?

ii. Administrative coherence and bureaucratic capacity (independent

variables). Can agencies work together for SBM implementation? Why or why

not? How does SBM fit in with the existing workload of bureaucrats at the

municipal corporations? What are the potential effects of SBM’s reputational

devices on these variables, if any?

1. Method 1: Semi-structured interviews with bureaucrats at the

municipal corporation and state bureaucrats who are policy

champions for water and sanitation.

• Example interview questions: Are there any inter-agency

collaborations (e.g. inter-agency task forces, seconded

positions) implemented by the Tamil Nadu state government

for SBM? Why or why not? Have there been any intra-agency

changes (e.g. increase in number of meetings between solid

44

waste management department and stormwater drains

department) as a result of SBM from 2016-2019? Are the SBM

bureaucrats only dedicated to its implementation in the

municipal corporations or do they have other work to do?

2. Method 2: Document analysis of MAWS’ policy notes on SBM from

2016 to 2019 to determine if there are any state-led coordination

efforts for SBM.

iii. Bureaucratic Autonomy (independent variable). Are there any reports of

political interference in the municipal corporations in SBM implementation? If

so, who are the politicians and how and why are they meddling in the agencies?

What are the potential effects of SBM’s reputational devices on these variables,

if any?

1. Method 1: Semi-structured interviews with SBM bureaucrats at the

municipal corporations, sanitation consultants familiar with

government-agency relationships in sanitation in India, and NGO

leaders in sanitation.

• Example interview questions: Have local politicians been

helpful in getting the message out about Swachh Survekshan

to residents? How would you describe the relationships

between politicians and the corporation in this city? How long

has it been like this?

2. Method 2: Analysis of media coverage on possible political

interference in municipal corporations in the three cities from 2016-

45

2019 in prominent national newspapers (e.g. The Hindu and Times

of India) and local news outlets (e.g. Citizen Matters, DT Next).

iv. NGOs’ ability to share expertise and civic participation (independent

variables). Are NGOs’ able to share their expertise with municipal

corporations? Why or why not? How does civic participation, and in the case of

Tamil Nadu, the lack of local elections since 2016, impact relationships between

NGOs and agencies? What are the potential effects of SBM’s reputational

devices on these variables, if any?

1. Method 1: Semi-structured interviews with NGO leaders in

sanitation, SBM bureaucrats at the corporations, state bureaucrats

who are policy champions for water and sanitation, and sanitation

consultants who work across the private, public, and NGO sectors.

• Example interview question: What stakeholders, besides the

corporation, do you think have contributed to your city’s high

rankings in Swachh Survekshan? Why do you think so? Have

you worked with them for a long time? What kind of

information do they have that is useful for your job?

2. Method 2: Participant observation of NGO behavioral change

campaigns for SBM to determine type and level of engagement

between NGOs and bureaucrats in attendance, if any, and private

sector stakeholders, if any.

v. Reputation (independent variable). How do the municipal corporations use

SBM’s public communication tools? What Swachh Survekshan certifications do

the three cities have? What type of social media presence do the municipal

46

corporations have on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for SBM, if they do?

What types of offline efforts are the agencies using for behavioral change (e.g.

television, radio, grassroots campaigns)? Are the cities promoting the

Swachhata app? Why or why not?

1. Method 1: Semi-structured interviews with SBM bureaucrats

• Example interview questions: What types of certifications in

Swachh Survekshan are you working towards (e.g. ODF+, 7-

star garbage rating)? Do you or your colleagues use social

media to communicate information about sanitation, SBM,

and Swachh Survkeshan? If so, what types of social media do

you use, and do you find it helpful? Have you found the

Swachhata app helpful in grievance redressal? What offline

efforts have you undertaken to improve behavioral change?

2. Method 2: Media and social media analysis of bureaucracies’ social

media usage, if any, to analyze type of posts, number of followers,

comments, and retweets

I used purposive and snowball sampling for my interviews. I identified and

contacted people from municipal corporation and SBM websites, relevant policy

documents, and newspaper reports and social media posts on SBM in Tamil Nadu from

2016-2019.23 At the end of my interviews, I asked participants if there were other people

I should talk to, and if they could connect me to them. In Chennai, access built on my

internship with Resilient Chennai, a partnership between the Greater Chennai

23 My fieldwork revealed that there is generally a two-year lag between the announcement of a national policy and its implementation by municipal corporations at the level of cities.

47

Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, from

November 2017 to January 2018 and from July 2018 to December 2018. During this

period, Resilient Chennai was in the middle of preparing a set of resilience strategies

around informality, civic governance, water, solid waste management, and infrastructure

financing for the city. I helped facilitate multi-stakeholder focus groups and interviews

with people working in the urban environmental planning and governance sector. My

affiliation with them offered me valuable opportunities to meet key informants in the

bureaucracy, particularly with senior and retired bureaucrats who are policy champions

for water and sanitation in Tamil Nadu. In addition, Resilient Chennai’s office was located

within the Greater Chennai Corporation’s Special Projects Department, next to the

Chennai Smart City team. I went to the agency in Chennai almost every day during my

fieldwork. Having a dedicated place to work on my research and talk to people in the

department was instrumental in cultivating relationships with bureaucrats in the building

and in understanding the nuances of bureaucratic norms and culture and project

implementation within the agency in an immersive process.

My primary method was semi-structured interviews. I interviewed bureaucrats

(largely engineers) at the municipal corporations familiar with SBM implementation,

senior and retired bureaucrats who have led infrastructure development projects in water

and sanitation in the state, sanitation consultants who work with the private and public

sectors and NGOs to implement sanitation projects across India at various levels of

government, Swachh Bharat ambassadors designated by each city to promote the policy,

scholars who study the politics of water and sanitation challenges in the state, and

sanitation NGO leaders. A detailed list can be found in Appendix A. The majority of my

interviews were in Tamil, and my interviews with senior bureaucrats in Chennai were

48

mostly in English. I conducted 62 repeated, in-depth interviews, averaging around two

hours. 20 interviews were with NGOs and 24 were with bureaucrats. A list of themes and

questions covered in my interviews are in Appendix B. I kept my interviews loosely

structured at the beginning of my fieldwork to gently guide the conversations but left it

open ended enough to develop new ideas. I also learned that going into interviews with

themes, and not specific questions, helped the conversations flow more easily in Tamil.

During the last phase of my fieldwork in the summer of 2019, I designed interview

questions specifically to examine the factors affecting bureaucratic coordination in each

city. I also attended five waste management and environmental planning conferences in

Chennai during my fieldwork, which helped contextualize SBM interventions in the city

(Appendix A).

I met people in their professional settings to better understand the physicality of

their working conditions, which helped in contextualizing information from the

interviews. For example, I interviewed bureaucrats in their offices, whether at the

municipal corporation, their current agency, or at the zonal offices. This strategy was

especially useful in Coimbatore when I met with NGO leaders in the various environments

they were embedded in from the businesses they owned to their NGO headquarters. My

interviews lasted from twenty minutes to more than four hours, with a mean around two

hours. Several interview participants, especially in Coimbatore and Trichy, told me that

researchers were not common in their cities, particularly in sanitation, and they

welcomed the opportunity to discuss the intricacies of SBM implementation at length.

I verified the data derived from interviews with other interviews and relevant

media coverage from trusted national and local news outlets and SBM policy manuals. I

interviewed several people more than once, and I have kept in touch with many of them

49

through my affiliation with Resilient Chennai and WhatsApp, where we exchange articles

and videos on sanitation and updates on my research and their work. These strategies

have been helpful in building trust and in putting people at ease when discussing sensitive

issues, like political meddling in the bureaucracy and implementation failures in SBM. I

attempted to work with the structure of bureaucratic hierarchy when possible out of

respect for the interview participants. I requested permission from senior bureaucrats in

each municipal corporation, either in writing or in person. Here, I outlined my research

and asked to speak with the relevant teams. This was successful in Chennai and Trichy,

but not in Coimbatore. In the latter city, bureaucrats wanted to speak with me on the

condition of anonymity so they could candidly describe their experiences of working in a

politically constrained environment. The Commissioner was also not available to meet

when I was in the city.

My supporting methods are document and media analysis and participant

observation. SBM and Swachh Survekshan have published many manuals detailing the

policy’s goals, ideal implementation structure, data collection methods, indicators, and

ranking methodologies. I studied these along with Policy Notes from the Tamil Nadu

Municipal Administration and Water Supply. The notes from 2016 to 2019 detail the

state’s strategy and updates for SBM, and earlier documents highlight Tamil Nadu’s

various interventions in sanitation. To gain a deeper understanding of the landscape of

SBM interventions in the state and their political context, I examined articles in

prominent news outlets, such as The Hindu, Times of India, and DTNext, from 2016 to

2019. I asked my interviewees for trusted local news sources in each city, and scanned

them for news related to SBM, particularly looking for responses to SBM’s public

communication efforts and articles or posts detailing relationships between the municipal

50

corporations and local and state politicians. Given SBM’s emphasis on social media, I

started following its accounts on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Out of all three cities,

Trichy was most prolific in social media usage for SBM. I followed the Trichy City

Corporation on YouTube and Twitter and the Commissioner on Twitter to analyze their

posts. The Coimbatore and Chennai Corporations also have Facebook accounts

documenting their SBM efforts, and the Coimbatore Corporation website has links to

photos and videos of its meetings and announcements. In addition to document and

media analysis, I used participant observation to understand the nature and quality of

coordination between NGOs, agencies, and other stakeholders in grassroots behavioral

change efforts. The NGOs I met with in Coimbatore and Trichy generously invited me to

participate in their behavioral change workshops and their field visits to households.

These events provided me with wonderful opportunities to observe stakeholder

interactions between bureaucrats, NGOs, sanitation workers, and households.

Based on my primary and secondary methods and background research from my

work with Resilient Chennai, I wrote extensive field notes with photographs I took when

permitted. I did not record my interviews since I had noticed in my previous public health

work in India that people were uneasy with being recorded, kept looking down at my

phone (my recording device), and getting distracted. Instead, as approved by MIT’s

Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects, I obtained verbal consent at

the beginning and end of each interview in Tamil or English, depending on the person’s

choice and comfort level.24 My notes included transcriptions of interviews, details of the

24 In this statement, I summarized my research objectives and asked them four questions on privacy and consent: Can I use your name in my dissertation? If not, how would you like to be referred to? What designation should I use for you? Can I use direct quotes from the interview or should I paraphrase? Can I contact you again with follow-up questions, if I need to? I made sure that people knew that the dissertation

51

physical environment, and personal reflections (Emerson 2011). These notes helped me

capture the ethnographic flavor of my fieldwork and organize information from multiple

sources, from casual conversations to social media posts. In my analysis, I coded my notes

three times by actor, city, factors affecting coordination, and SBM’s reputational devices

to ensure consistency.

1.6 Structure of Dissertation

In Chapter 2, I expand on my theoretical framework linking organizational

reputation, as proxied by public communication efforts, and coordination. I review the

literature on organizational reputation, and identify four key questions for my study of

Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy: Who is the audience for agencies in SBM

implementation? What dimensions of reputation are being emphasized by SBM’s

reputational tools? What strategies are agencies using to augment their reputation? What

are the limits of reputational tools? In Chapter 3, I describe how inter-agency

noncoordination is a function of weak bureaucratic capacity and administrative

incoherence. SBM’s reputational tools have not had a significant impact here. Instead,

they have exacerbated two aspects of bureaucratic capacity: the emphasis on

documentation and mechanically checking off of boxes. In Chapter 4, I explore how SBM’s

reputational devices have empowered NGOs in Coimbatore, which are already embedded

in business and community networks and have strong ties to the agency. These NGOs are

in part strengthened by the lack of bureaucratic autonomy at the Coimbatore Corporation

as a result of political meddling. In Chennai and Trichy, SBM’s reputational tools do not

would be available online. For people who wished to be anonymous, I assigned them a unique identifier and have attempted my best to de-identify them within the dissertation (see Appendices A and B).

52

have an effect on agency-NGO coordination. Exploring the historical context around

partnerships between the two reveals that rise of PPPs, environmental activism, and

matching agency priorities to NGO expertise affect coordination. In Chapter 5, I explain

how SBM’s public communication efforts, while a galvanizing force on the ground for

existing sanitation efforts, have not been able to address the institutional barriers to

sanitation improvements. Further, I emphasize how while SBM has certainly raised the

profile of sanitation in India, the policy’s focus on visibility as opposed to institutional

reform obfuscates the amount of work needed in the urban sanitation sector to improve

outcomes. I then highlight the cultural rootedness of SBM’s programming, which offers

lessons for other countries wishing to implement a similar policy in sanitation or in other

sectors. I conclude with an epilogue, reflecting on my positionality during fieldwork.

53

2| THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: ORGANIZATIONAL

REPUTATION AND COORDINATION

2.1 The Cultural Politics of Reputation in Sanitation

“It’s so nice to see someone like you interested in sanitation.” I received many

variations of this remark during my fieldwork. I was initially bemused by these comments

and upon clarification, I was told that foreign women from elite North American

universities are not considered “typical” sanitation researchers in India. When I pushed

them for what a conventional researcher looked like, people were confused and no clear

answer emerged. What was evident, however, was that sanitation was collectively deemed

an unworthy line of inquiry for me or the hallowed halls of MIT. These interactions

crystallize how reputational indicators like social class and status are wrapped up in

sanitation, even in its study. Various authors, including George (2008), Alok (2010), and

Brewis and Wutich (2019), have pointed out how peculiar sanitation and its interventions

are compared to other service sectors like energy and water; reputational concerns infuse

every dimension of sanitation, particularly in India.

Ideas of cleanliness, purity, and hygiene that undergird sanitation are inextricably

linked to class, caste, religion, and social status in the country (Coffey et al. 2017; Vyas &

Spears 2018; Alok 2010). For instance, those who traditionally have had poor access to

toilets and solid waste services, like slum dwellers and the urban poor, are deemed filthy

and inferior by upper classes (Walters 2013). Manual scavengers are expected to handle

human waste without question because they scrape the bottom of the caste system (Doron

& Jeffrey 2018). Sanitation workers are essential but invisible cogs in environmental

54

sanitation services, and yet their work is socially stigmatized because of their close contact

with waste (WHO 2019). Further, reputation is used as a tool in behavioral interventions.

CLTS, for example, employs blaming and shaming as triggers to induce habit change,

without considering structural constraints or human dignity (Doron & Raja 2015). In

contrast, reputation-based interventions do not emerge in the water sector, for instance,

to prevent illegal pipe connections or to address water scarcity. As a result of these cultural

and social factors wrapped up in sanitation, it is considered socially taboo and therefore

receives less policy attention compared to other types of public services (George 2008;

WSP 2011).

Given the importance of reputation in sanitation, what are its effects on policy

implementation? SBM is a policy that heavily leverages reputation to encourage

behavioral change in individuals and organizations. These behavior-based policies have

become prominent in the last decade in many sectors around the world, from public

health to transportation, in an effort to understand human decision-making and their

impact on development outcomes (World Bank 2015). However, behavioral policies

largely focus on understanding how individuals behave, and not organizations. In my

study, I explore how SBM’s reputational “nudges” may impact coordination behavior in

agencies through the lens of organizational reputation.

2.2 Behavioral Policies and Organizations

Public health interventions have drawn on psychology and sociology for years to

design health promotion campaigns, and have used social cognitive theory to identify role

models to model healthy behavior (World Bank 2016). While the field of behavioral

economics emerged in the 1970s (Datta & Mullainathan 2012), foundational economic

55

thinkers have been interested in the relationships between human decision-making and

economics for centuries, starting with Adam Smith (World Bank 2015). In The Theory of

Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith wrote about how the psychology of economic decision-

making is caught between “passions” and the “impartial spectator” (World Bank 2015;

Cullen 2006). John Maynard Keynes described the “money illusion” (thinking of money

in nominal versus real terms) and “animal spirits” (relying on instincts and feelings to

make long-term investments) (World Bank 2015). F.A. Hayek believed that there are

limits to how much information an individual can process, and that humans are unable

to weigh the costs and benefits of outcomes for every decision (World Bank 2015). Albert

Hirschman outlined the value of loyalty and cooperation in human decision-making

(World Bank 2015).

The 2008 financial crisis increased public policy interest in behavioral economics,

viewed then as heterodox economics, because the global meltdown revealed the flagrant

limitations of neoclassical economics and de-regulation (Oliver 2013). There was also

support for behavioral economics from people who were against regulations from both

sides of the political spectrum (Oliver 2013). This group was interested in how people’s

behavior can be changed with regulations or bans (Oliver 2013). In this political

environment, Thaler and Cass Sunstein, a jurist, published a book called Nudge in 2008,

which examines the applications of behavioral economics in public policy. Thaler and

Sunstein develop a framework based on libertarian paternalism, which empowers

policymakers to create an appropriate “choice architecture” that “nudges” individuals to

make sensible decisions without infringing on their personal freedoms. Thaler and

Sunstein went on to serve as leaders in “nudge units” in the UK and US governments

respectively to apply behavioral insights in various policy realms (Afif 2017). There has

56

also been interest in behavioral public policy from the global South, including the

Peruvian and Indian governments (Afif 2017; Rajyadaksha 2016; Sharma & Tiwari 2016;

Gupta 2018).

In international development, the behavioral paradigm has highlighted the

importance of understanding the psychology of decision-making in the poor, given their

drastically different constraints and burdens (Datta & Mullainathan 2012; Banerjee &

Duflo 2011). The emphasis on behavior has foregrounded the importance of

understanding psychological, social, and cultural factors that influence development

outcomes (World Bank 2015). This paradigm overturns the notion in neoclassical

economics that individuals are rational, utility-maximizing economic agents, and

reminds economists that human beings are simply human (Datta & Mullainathan 2012;

Bogliacino et al. 2016). Unlike the elusive Homo Economicus, humans throughout the

policy chain are forgetful, have limited attention spans, have biases, and have problems

with self-control (Datta & Mullainathan 2012; Bogliacino et al. 2016; Kahneman 2013;

Shelton et al. 2013). Examples of effective behavioral interventions in development

include reminders (e.g. text messages to take HIV drugs for patients in Kenya),

nonmonetary gifts (e.g. lentils and plates given to parents who bring their children for

vaccination campaigns in India), making interventions convenient (e.g. free chlorine

dispensers near water sources in Kenya), and tweaking the timing of conditional cash

transfers (e.g. releasing part of cash transfer when school enrollment decisions have to be

made in Colombia) (World Bank 2015).

Randomized, controlled trials (RCTs), which emerged in the late 1990s and 2000s,

shifted the emphasis in development from macro-level policies to micro-level

interventions (Banerjee & Duflo 2011). RCTs in development explore behavioral

57

differences across intervention and control groups to determine how an intervention

shapes human behavior (Banerjee & Duflo 2011). For example, does access to microloans

induce poor people to start businesses? Does paying a nominal fee for a bed net encourage

more people to use these nets compared to when they receive them for free (Banerjee &

Duflo 2011; Datta & Mullainathan 2012). While RCTs are generally considered the “gold

standard” in development economics, critics like Nancy Cartwright and Angus Deaton

warn against overestimating the strength of causal relationships emphasized by RCT

researchers (Deaton & Cartwright 2018; Cartwright 2011). They argue that social

interventions are highly context-specific and that RCTs cannot “randomize” away

confounding variables (Deaton & Cartwright 2018). Instead of only asking how an

intervention fails or succeeds, researchers need to ask why the outcome occurred to fully

understand the context-specific causal mechanisms (Deaton & Cartwright 2018). Further,

Lant Pritchett and other development economists assert that RCTs’ focus on micro-level

interventions fail to produce systems-level changes needed to produce any meaningful

improvements in society (Pritchett 2014a; The Guardian 2018).

In 2015, the World Bank published its World Development Report, entitled “Mind,

Society, and Behavior,” explicitly linking the recent explosion of research in behavioral

science to development practice. The report describes two major insights that apply to

international development: people think automatically (individuals think narrowly and

are not deliberate in their thought processes) and people think with mental models

(individuals use examples, narratives, and stereotypes drawn from their own

communities and experiences that may not always be objective). These mental models are

of particular significance to implementation because it shapes the ways in which

implementers and policy beneficiaries perceive institutions, the policy issue at hand, and

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the implementation process (World Bank 2015). Mental models are powerful and persist

even when our environment changes. Nelson Mandela captured the stickiness of mental

models when he flew from Sudan to Ethiopia and realized that the pilot was Black:

We put down briefly in Khartoum, where we changed to an Ethiopian Airways flight to Addis. Here I experienced a rather strange sensation. As I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly an airplane? (Mandela in World Bank 2015) Despite the persistence of these mental models, it is possible to try to slowly alter

them through policies like changing institutions (e.g. starting affirmative action programs

for female leaders in patriarchal societies to change perceptions of women among men),

the media (using the media to highlight small families to encourage families to have fewer

children), and educational interventions (using cooperative learning methods to improve

social capital) (WDR 2015).

WDR (2015) also stresses the importance of studying how behavioral interventions

should be implemented; in particular, it emphasizes that policymakers, development

professionals, and implementers should reflect on their own biases when designing and

implementing behavioral change policies, and underscores the need for implementing

agencies to engage in several iterations of implementation, experimentation, and

evaluation to better understand how different types and delivery modes of behavioral

interventions work. They suggest using pilot projects to test out the efficacy of different

interventions and implementation modes, and incorporate the feedback into future

iterations of policy implementation (WDR 2015). Unfortunately, their recommendations

do not appear feasible for many local implementing organizations in the global South,

caught in “capability traps” (Pritchett et al. 2010).

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Behavioral science enthusiasts claim that a more nuanced understanding of

human behavior and decision-making can lead to better policies and to a deeper

understanding of why some interventions have failed in the past (Bogliacino et al. 2016;

Datta & Mullainathan 2012; Chetty 2015; Weber 2013). Datta and Mullainathan (2012)

refer to how behavioral economics can lead to a “science of policy design,” and can offer

a different approach to framing problems and interventions. For example, to figure out

why people do not take medicines regularly on time, a behavioral approach re-defines the

questions, possible interventions, and the scope of the problem: Do people not take

medicine because they are forgetful or is it because they are anti-medicine? Will text

reminders or financial incentives change their behavior? Is it possible to sustain

behavioral change over time? (Datta & Mullainathan 2012). Behavioral science hopes to

align interventions with human behavior for effective policy outcomes.

Critiques of the behavioral approach fall into four camps. First, some critics find

the concept of nudging, as defined by Thaler and Sunstein, vague. Can nudges be

regulations? Policies? At what level should nudges be incorporated (Bogliacino et al.

2016)? Second, scholars have pointed out the disconnect in behavioral economics

between the acknowledgement that people think in mental models that are socially and

culturally constructed and the insistence of some researchers on studying individuals and

not communities (Bogliacino et al. 2016). Third, the ethics of behavioral interventions

have received the most attention in the literature. “Who nudges the nudger” (Bogliacino

et al. 2016)? How does the nudger determine the “appropriate” choice architecture? From

where does the nudger derive their legitimacy? Are behavioral interventions, particularly

those that wield shame as a lever, ethical? (Bogliacino et al. 2016; Engel & Susilo 2014;

Bartram et al. 2012). These questions interrogate the assumed neutrality of the

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policymaker and implementer. Fourth, there is a risk of relying only on behavioral

interventions and ignoring large-scale structural investments and policy tools in the

public sector (Bogliacino et al. 2016). For example, in response to the United Kingdom’s

recent focus on behavioral science, The Lancet (2012) published a scathing critique of the

government’s use of behavioral interventions in healthcare as lazy substitutions for

evidence-based state legislation, like the implementation of soda and cigarette taxes to

improve public health.

To date, the literature on behavioral interventions has concentrated on

understanding why and how individuals make decisions, and how policy environments

can be constructed to “nudge” people toward better choices. In my study, I explore how

SBM uses reputational tools to “nudge” agencies toward coordination. While the

behavioral public policy literature has examined “nudging” and “budging” in individuals,

I investigate if these actions work on organizations, specifically the agencies involved in

SBM implementation in Tamil Nadu, India.

2.3 Organizational Reputation, Communication, and Coordination

Reputation and Bureaucracies

Similar to sanitation’s lowly status, the bureaucracy is a much-maligned entity in

many countries. While bureaucracies were initially envisioned as more efficient,

meritocratic, and impartial alternatives to corrupt, absolutist state systems, they have

come under flak for hundreds of years for their rigidity, disorganization, and

oversimplification of human life and activity (Weber 1978; Ljungholm 2016; Scott 1998).

Max Weber set the tone for how modern bureaucracies are perceived in his description of

their general characteristics: rational, hierarchical, file-based, and rule-bound (Weber

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1978). His depiction of this soulless machine has been echoed in disciplines beyond

sociology, extending to popular culture. Within academic circles, economists consider

bureaucracies inflexible and inefficient, and consider it a form of government intrusion

in private life (Carnis 2009; Gajduschek 2003). The most influential critique in this

discipline emerges from Ludwig Von Mises, an economist in the Austrian School. While

he acknowledges the need for bureaucracy in some instances like the protection of

property rights to ensure social cooperation, he argues that all other agencies are tools of

unnecessary state intervention, unchecked by profit and loss calculations (Mises 1944).

In political science and anthropology, researchers point out how bureaucracies fortify

socioeconomic inequalities and create an illusion of progress and legitimacy through their

emphasis on documentation, “audit cultures,” and more recently, e-governance

mechanisms (Strathern 2000; Mathur 2017; Hetherington 2011). Scholars argue that

documentation, whether online or offline, has become a false symbol for legitimacy and

action within agencies, recalling Andrews et al. (2017) description of isomorphic mimicry

(Mathur 2017; Strathern 2000; Hetherington 2011). Navaro-Yashin (2012) explores how

identity documents issued by the internationally unrecognized Turkish Republic of

Northern Cyprus shape personal, social, legal, and political identities among Turkish-

Cypriots in the United Kingdom and Cyprus. In Pakistan, Hull (2012) describes how

“graphic artefacts,” like maps, manuals, and files, shape urban development patterns in

Islamabad and their socio-spatial consequences for residents. Scholars in this tradition

thus illustrate how bureaucratic rituals and “rational” logics negatively impact everyday

lives of their clients.

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The enduring image of the bureaucracy as a place of Byzantine rituals and

indolence has been amplified in popular culture. For instance, Alain De Botton, a British

philosopher and author, writes in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work:

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork. (De Botton 2009, p. 59)

Similarly, Russian write Mikhail Bulgakov emphasizes how powerful this paperwork is in

articulating human identity in the Soviet Union in The Master and Margarita:

“What you say is true,” the master observed, struck by the neatness of Koroviev’s work, “that if there are no papers, there’s no person. I have no papers, so there’s precisely no me.” (Bulgakov 1996, p. 300-301)

On television, one of the best-known caricatures of bureaucracies is BBC’s Yes Minister

and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister, from the 1980s. In addition to unpacking the perverse

dynamics in bureaucrat-politician relationships in Britain, the show also depicts senior

bureaucrats’ aversion to streamlining and modernizing the civil service in order to

preserve their power and social status. Across different types of media, the bureaucracy

is thus vilified as a fastidious machine devoid of humanity.

In India, perceptions of bureaucracies are equally dismal. Agencies are universally

dismissed as corrupt and incompetent in both scholarship and popular culture. For

example, the British referred to Indians working in the colonial administration as ‘Babus,’

a term that is now derogatorily used to refer to current bureaucrats, particularly IAS

officers (CPR 2018; Malik 2017; Davis 2016).25 Mathur (2016) explores the effects of this

25 Babus is a term used to describe Indians working in the British colonial administration. It was sometimes used respectfully in deference to their perceived status and power, and sometimes derogatorily by the public. In post-colonial India, this word has come to be associated with bureaucratic ineffectiveness and indolence (Davis 2016).

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Babu culture in obstructing the implementation of progressive policies and laws in India.

Using the case of a small Himalayan town, she outlines how the translation of anti-poverty

development policies on the ground is complicated by bureaucratic hierarchies and

fidelity to paperwork. In short, implementing the letter of the law obfuscates the spirit of

the law. Similarly, Chatterji and Mehta (2007) argue that bureaucratic form and practices

impact government responses to religious violence in Mumbai. They describe how the

processes of setting up investigative committees and documentation of the riots from the

agencies’ perspectives shape narratives of violence and slum redevelopment in the city

that privilege the perspective of the state over that of the people (Chatterji & Mehta 2007).

In the media, Indian bureaucracies continue to be the public face of state failure.

From engaging in corruption to mismanaging projects and natural hazards, agencies’

missteps are visibly splashed across newspaper headlines. For example, one of Delhi’s

civic bodies is currently being investigated for financial “irregularities” (Rajput 2019). In

Tamil Nadu, local agencies were viciously attacked for their inadequate and poorly

coordinated responses to the devastation caused by the 2015 floods in Chennai

(Thangavelu 2015). In 2018, India Today’s headline was “Battling Babudom,” and the

title of its cover story was “Lord of the Files” (Jha 2018) (Figures 1 and 2). Reforming the

Indian bureaucracy to improve everyday facets of Indian life, from incorporating

technology to modernize bureaucracies to augmenting the financial viability of municipal

corporations, is a popular topic for media pundits (EPW 2019; Viswanathan 2012). In

response to these negative perceptions, the Indian government has undertaken public

sector rankings and rewards to motivate agencies and to improve their reputation with

the public (Dash 2018).

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Figure 1: India Today’s cover story in Oct 2018 (Jha 2018)

Figure 2: Cartoon accompanying the India Today cover story entitled, ‘Lord of the Files’ (Jha 2018)

In fiction, too, bureaucracies receive a brutal treatment. English, August is perhaps

the best-known book on the insidious absurdities of Indian bureaucratic rituals.

Upamanyu Chatterjee (1988) explores this intricate world carefully held together with red

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tape by bureaucrats fighting to protect their personal spheres of influence and power.

Twenty years later, Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize in 2008 for White Tiger, which

places bureaucracies at the center of the production and reproduction of corruption in

governance systems in India. Given these bleak perspectives of bureaucracies across

various platforms, their reputation becomes particularly important in policy

implementation, especially with the rise of behavioral change policies that hinge on

cooperation between agencies and the public.

Organizational Reputation and Public Sector Behavior

The importance of reputation is not a new idea in academia. In 1956, Erving

Goffmann described how individuals seek to control and manage other people’s

perceptions of them by altering their behavior or physical appearance. Goffmann (1956)

asserted that the avoidance of embarrassment, whether of oneself or others, was the

fundamental principle guiding social interactions. However, only in 2001 did a conceptual

framework coalesce for organizational reputation in Daniel Carpenter’s research.

Charting the evolution of various United States bureaucracies, like the Food and Drug

Administration and the Department of the Interior, Carpenter (2001; 2010) illustrates

how reputational calculations impact organizational behavior, ranging from responses to

reputational threats to communication strategies. Carpenter’s (2001; 2010) research

focuses on explaining the origin and shape of bureaucratic form and power through a

reputational lens. Scholars building on his work have subsequently used reputation to

investigate other aspects of agency behavior: claiming jurisdiction (Maor 2010), strategic

communication (Gilad et al. 2013; Maor et al. 2013), and decision-making in regulatory

bodies (Gilad 2009; Etienne 2015; Maor & Sulitzeanu-Kenan 2012). An emerging strand

of research within this scholarship has recently started to investigate bureaucratic

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coordination (Busuioc 2016; Busuioc & Lodge 2016; Busuioc & Lodge 2017; Moynihan

2012).

Carpenter (2001; 2010) presents reputation as an alternative way of explaining

public sector behavior, beyond the traditional positioning of bureaucracies as rational

actors. He emphasizes how reputations are embedded in culture, history, and status,

which enriches the discussion on bureaucratic behavior and incentives, allowing for a

more context-sensitive analysis of policy implementation (Carpenter 2010). This

perspective on reputation is particularly salient for the study of sanitation and behavioral

interventions. The 2015 World Development Report explores how mental models are

sticky; even when reality changes, mental models do not (WDR 2015). Mental models

matter in implementation because people are less likely to trust the authority of

bureaucracies that they have deemed inefficient and corrupt for a long time, even if

agencies have reformed (WDR 2015). Mental models are also important in sanitation.

SBM, at its core, is a national-level push to unstick long-held perceptions on sanitation,

caste, and class. The lens of organizational reputation thus allows for a more nuanced

exploration of bureaucratic behavior that is grounded within the culture and history of a

particular place and sector.

What is organizational reputation and why does it matter in understanding

bureaucracies? According to Carpenter (2010), reputation is “a set of symbolic beliefs

about an organization embedded in multiple audiences” (p. 10). An agency’s reputation

can “animate, empower, and constrain” bureaucracies, and is a source of bureaucratic

autonomy and power (Carpenter 2010, p. 33). In Reputation and Power, Carpenter

(2010) investigates how and why the FDA has garnered so much influence in the face of

an ever-changing regulatory environment. He argues that the agency’s authority, both

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domestic and international, lies in its reputation to evoke praise and fear from its multiple

audiences, ranging from pharmaceutical companies, scientific communities, and other

organizations competing on its turf like the National Cancer Institute and the American

Medical Association (Carpenter 2010). Tracing the history of the FDA and “disease

politics” in the United States, Carpenter (2010) demonstrates how the agency’s reputation

can impact its relationships with the public, its legal standing, and its capacity to frame

debates in the public sphere using its technical expertise. Busuioc (2016) also points out

that an agency’s positive reputation plays a protective role; it can help in reinforcing the

organization’s autonomy, building public support for its policies, and ensuring its

survival. Further, Ingold & Leifeld (2014) highlight how a good reputation is critical in

effective policy implementation across different sectors, ranging from

telecommunications to climate change and environmental health, in Switzerland and

Germany. In short, an agency’s reputation affects its ability to carry out its mandate.

Picci (2011) argues that reputation has become a particularly useful lens in the

study of the public sector because of the rise of data-based governance and social media

usage in the twenty-first century. He points to how reputational mechanisms, like

rankings evaluating agency performance and publicly available data on policy

implementation, can pressure agencies to behave honestly and efficiently in an effort to

be well-regarded by their constituents and other agencies (Picci 2011). This is reminiscent

of Connors’ (2005; 2007) finding on how NGOs in Bangalore issued report cards for local

bureaucracies to improve accountability and transparency. SBM employs this logic at the

national level. Each indicator in Swachh Survekshan has a description of the type of

documentation needed to evaluate it. For instance, to verify that sanitation workers are

afforded health benefits and protective gear, ULBs are asked to upload evidence

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(documents and photos) indicating the size of the sanitation workforce, use of protective

gear by workers, and linkages with the Ayushman Bharat health scheme (Swachh

Survekshan Toolkit 2019). This emphasis on documentation and evaluation is a bid to

methodically improve different parts of environmental sanitation in Indian cities using

data, and to incentivize agencies to perform better with public rankings.

Audiences in Agency Reputation

Existing scholarship explores three aspects of organizational reputation: the

network of audiences which help craft the agency’s reputation, dimensions of reputation,

and strategies employed by bureaucracies to improve reputation. Carpenter (2010) links

the types of audiences an agency has to its power. Common audience types include

legislatures, policy beneficiaries, scientific communities, politicians, and the media

(Carpenter 2001; 2010; Lee & Van Ryzin 2019). Each audience provides a different type

of power. Legislatures authorize agency funding (Carpenter 2010). Policy beneficiaries

(firms, households, and people) obey the agency’s rules and guidelines or undermine its

legitimacy by challenging its authority (Carpenter 2010). Scientific and technical

organizations and academic institutions can accept or reject the agency’s technical

expertise during implementation (Carpenter 2010). The media shapes perceptions of

agencies through its coverage of the agency’s successes and failures (Carpenter 2010).

Based on its legitimacy, politicians may choose to not interfere in bureaucratic autonomy

(Carpenter 2001).

In this web of audiences, Lee and Van Ryzin (2019) emphasize that organizational

reputation is fluid. What one audience sees is not what another sees. Perceptions,

judgements, and reputational threats thus vary across audiences, shaping the power of

these agencies, and by extension, the state (Carpenter 2010). Carpenter (2010) highlights

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how an agency can present “different faces for different audiences” (p. 68). This

phenomenon can emerge from turf wars between an agency and its competitors; the

American Medical Association, for instance, would see a different side of the FDA

compared to a pharmaceutical company being vetted by the agency (Carpenter 2010). It

can also come from an agency’s mandate to regulate and play the bad cop in enforcing

laws (Carpenter 2010). Busuioc and Lodge (2017) assert that within this network of

audiences, a hierarchy exists. The authors theorize that an agency chooses which

audience(s) to be accountable to in order to enhance its reputation (Busuioc & Lodge

2017). Reputation thus functions as a “filtering mechanism” for organizations to prioritize

which external demands to privilege (Busuioc & Lodge 2017).

Dimensions of Agency Reputation

In addition to different audiences, agencies have multiple dimensions of

reputation, which explain how beliefs about an agency are structured (Carpenter 2010).

The literature on organizational reputation in public administration outlines four

dimensions: performative, moral, technical, and legal-procedural (Carpenter 2010;

Carpenter & Krause 2012). The business literature on corporate reputation adds a fifth

dimension: emotional. All five dimensions are outlined below:

1. Performative. What is the quality of decision-making and the capacity of an

agency in carrying out its mandate and announced goals (Carpenter 2010)?

How aggressively and visibly is the organization pursuing implementation

(Busuioc & Lodge 2016)? Busuioc and Lodge (2016) argue that the visibility of

efforts is important in this dimension since organizational reputation is

augmented by implementing popular policies.

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2. Moral. Does the organization have moral and ethical goals and processes

(Carpenter 2010)? Does it protect its constituents (Carpenter 2010)? Carpenter

(2001) describes how the United States Post Office was regarded as a moral

guardian in the Progressive Era because it protected families from sins like

pornography and gambling.

3. Technical. Does the organization have the capacity for technical, professional,

and technological expertise (Carpenter 2010)? Carpenter (2010) discusses how

the FDA’s reputation as a bastion of regulatory knowledge and effective

enforcement has produced FDA-like entities across the world.

4. Legal-Procedural. Does the organization follow established legal norms in

decision-making and policy implementation (Carpenter 2010)? One of the

reputational threats to the FDA emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s when the

agency came under pressure to minimize restrictions on experimental drugs to

combat the HIV/AIDS crisis (Carpenter 2010). It faced the dilemma of

choosing between following its established protocols to preserve its legitimacy

and responding to a public health crisis (Carpenter 2010).

5. Emotional. What feelings and attitudes exist about an agency and its mission?

Fombrun et al. (2000) and Schwaiger (2004) argue that emotional responses

to organizations are important in shaping its reputation. This is especially

relevant in a policy like SBM that aims to capture the hearts and minds of

Indian citizens with a heady mix of Bollywood and post-colonial nationalism.

These different dimensions of reputation address the concerns of an agency’s multiple

audiences, which can range from citizens and NGOs to regulators, and other national and

sub-national authorities.

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Strategies of Building Reputation

The third aspect of organizational reputation discussed in the literature is how

agencies build reputation. Drawing on theoretical and empirical studies of international

pharmaceutical industries, Maor (2007; 2011), describe how agencies wishing to improve

their reputation after a crisis can emulate practices and policies employed by other

agencies with good reputation. Petkova (2012) echoes this notion of positive association

in her analysis of corporate reputation. According to her, organizations can seek

affiliations with other stakeholders with high reputations and can hire well-regarded

management teams (Petkova 2012). The last and most common lever outlined in the

literature is the use of communication. Waeraas and Byrkjeflot (2012) assert that

communication in the public sector influences perceptions and “closes the gap between

organizational identity and reputation” (p. 191). The authors declare that the most

effective messaging boosts the organization’s visibility, and connects emotionally with the

public to improve reputation (Waeraas & Byrkjeflot 2012). Examples of communication

include publicly announced changes in an agency’s mission or its rebranding through

different logos (Waeraas & Byrkjeflot 2012). In addition, Maor et al. (2012) explore the

relationship between reputation and communication in the Israeli banking sector. Based

on their analysis of the banking regulator’s responses to public opinion from 1998 to

2009, they find that central banks that have a long history of being seen as credible and

effective enjoy a strong reputation and do not feel the need to communicate to their

various audiences (Maor et al. 2012). However, banks with poor reputation have to

“shout” (Maor et al. 2012). Organizations can thus use communication strategically to

achieve their goals, depending on their reputations with their different audiences.

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Organizational Reputation and Coordination

The literature on the impact of organizational reputation on coordination is

limited. In the few studies on coordination, authors unanimously agree that coordination

goes against an agency’s mandate and reputational incentives affect decisions to

coordinate (Busuioc 2016; Maor 2013; Moynihan 2012; Wilson 1989). For example,

Wilson (1989) declares that agencies are dedicated to their individual mandate, and any

activity that takes away from the execution of this mandate is thus avoided. Maor (2013)

reinforces this point. He argues that organizations are evaluated on whether they can

deliver on their mandate efficiently “by avoiding visible failures,” not if they coordinate

or not (Maor 2013). If cooperation is necessary, reputational calculations factor into

decision-making: does coordination provide the organization with a big enough gain?

What is the cost of this coordination (Busuioc 2016)? For agencies, the benefits of

coordination rarely outweigh its costs, which include increased inefficiencies in

bureaucratic processes and the emergence of new rivals on their turf (Busuioc 2016).

In their empirical analyses of reputation and coordination, Busuioc (2016) and

Moynihan (2012) find that decisions to coordinate are dependent on “reputational

uniqueness,” turf wars, and blame avoidance. An agency’s survival depends on its

distinctive reputation which is achieved through the carving out and protection of its turf,

either physically or in the regulatory sense (Busuioc 2016). Coordination can thus be a

threat to the organization’s ability to distinguish itself from similar stakeholders (Busuioc

2016). Busuioc (2016) analyzes how reputation influences coordination in two agencies

in the European Union: Europol and Frontex. Both agencies were created to fulfill the

need for coordination in approaches to transboundary challenges in the region; Europol

is in charge of crime and Frontex deals with illegal migration (Busuioc 2016). In the case

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of Europol, cooperation threatens the “reputational uniqueness” of national offices

overseeing criminal activities, disincentivizing coordination (Busuioc 2016). Since crimes

occur locally, crime prevention and responses augment reputations of these offices

(Busuioc 2016). By sharing data with Europol, national agencies are giving away their

intelligence, depleting their reputation (Busuioc 2016). On the other hand, horizontal

coordination between national immigration authorities and vertical coordination

between national agencies and Frontex enhance reputation of all stakeholders involved

(Busuioc 2016). Through sharing of information and transnational enforcement,

coordination helps all agencies fulfill their mandate of reducing illegal migration (Busuioc

2016).

In the United States, Moynihan (2012) illustrates how blame avoidance in public

service networks hampers coordination. Using the case of Hurricane Katrina, he argues

that factors like trust, reputation, and reciprocity matter for policy implementation

(Moynihan 2012). During Katrina, relationships within the federal government (White

House, Department of Defense, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and

Department of Homeland Security) and between federal and state agencies in Louisiana

became increasingly tense, obstructing coordination despite the existence of a political

framework articulating agency responsibilities (Moynihan 2012). As the disaster unfolded

in a highly public manner, officials at both the state and federal levels spent more time

blaming each other for inadequate responses, instead of addressing the problems at hand

(Moynihan 2012). Both Moynihan (2012) and Busuioc (2016) thus highlight that, from a

reputational standpoint, it is much easier for agencies to not coordinate.

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Limits of Organizational Reputation Theories

While organizational reputation can provide a culturally rich lens to study public

sector behavior, to what extent is it generalizable? Maor (2015) considers the limits of the

reputational perspective. He argues that agencies might be constrained in boosting their

reputation through a lack of funding, administrative culture, or political interference

(Maor 2015). He also describes how reputational tools, like using the media, can be a

double-edged sword for bureaucracies (Maor 2015). By opening themselves up to media

scrutiny, agencies may not be able to exert control over journalistic narratives, which

could be detrimental to their existing reputation (Maor 2015). Further, Maor (2015)

questions if all agencies are reputationally sensitive. Some agencies may be shielded from

reputational consequences if they share close, protective ties with politicians or have

passive audiences who do not leverage their influence over an agency’s reputation to

agitate for better performance (Maor 2015). There are few empirical studies that highlight

the limits of organizational reputation. Notably, Christensen and Laegrid (2015) find that

reputation management in the public sector may not always have an effect. Using the case

of the Norwegian police after a terrorist attack in 2011, they assert that if trust in public

institutions are historically high, short-term reputational threats and agency responses

may not disrupt the status quo (Christensen & Laegrid 2015).

2.4 Theoretical Framework: Connecting Reputation and Coordination in Sanitation The literature on organizational reputation in the public sector almost exclusively

focuses on agencies in the Global North, with an emphasis on the United States and

Northern Europe. Further, the pharmaceutical industry has been the main unit of analysis

for many empirical studies, inspired by Carpenter’s (2010) foundational work on the FDA.

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While reputation has been used to explain different varieties of public sector behavior, its

insights on bureaucratic coordination are also limited. My dissertation contributes to

these gaps in the literature. Sanitation is a field rife with reputational tensions, especially

in India. Adding to this, Indian bureaucracies have a poor reputation in policy

implementation (CPR 2018). Given the decentralized nature of sanitation

implementation in the country, organizational reputation becomes especially valuable

since bureaucracies in states and cities function with high levels of autonomy and

discretion. SBM can only have an impact on the ground if agencies are able to carry out

their mandate.

Figure 3 illustrates the theoretical framework linking coordination and reputation

in urban sanitation. I explore how the lens of organizational reputation helps explain

bureaucratic coordination and how reputation interacts with the other factors impacting

coordination in sanitation. Drawing on the literature on reputation, I ask four questions:

Who is the audience for municipal corporations implementing SBM? What dimensions

of reputation are being emphasized by the municipal corporations’ use of SBM’s

reputational devices - Swachh Survekshan rankings and rewards, the Swachhata app, and

media and social media campaigns? What reputational strategies are agencies using (or

not using) under SBM, and why? What are the limits, if any, to reputation management

in SBM? In Chapters 3 and 4, I present my findings on bureaucratic coordination in

Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy.

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Figure 3: Theoretical Framework

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3| HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL COORDINATION BETWEEN

AGENCIES IN TAMIL NADU 3.1 Introduction

SBM’s reputational devices, particularly the Swachh Survekshan indicators that

measure service-level progress, hope to incentivize coordination between agencies in

cities to improve sanitation provision. In Chennai, this means coordination between the

Chennai Corporation and Metro Water to work on solid waste management and the

sewerage system, and between the municipal corporation and the Slum Clearance Board

to augment slum health. In Coimbatore and Trichy, inter-agency coordination needs to

occur between each city’s municipal corporation, the Slum Clearance Board, and the

Tamil Nadu Water and Drainage Board. However, I find that in the three cities many of

these relationships suffered from weak bureaucratic capacity and administrative

incoherence. Despite the Swachh Survekshan indicators assuming inter-agency

coordination, SBM’s reputational devices were no match for entrenched institutional

weaknesses to encourage horizontal coordination between agencies in the state. In fact,

implementing these reputational strategies added to the existing workload in agencies.

What was surprising, however, was the increase in vertical coordination between the three

municipal corporations and national-level actors, like the Ministry of Housing and Urban

Affairs and the National Green Tribunal, because of the policy’s emphasis on

documentation. This was a welcome development for city agencies since the

implementation of national policies may not always feel locally grounded.

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3.2 National-Level Actors in Urban Sanitation Governance in India

The 74the Amendment to the Constitution was passed in 1992 to empower urban

local bodies (ULBs) in charge of water and sanitation to improve urban service provision

(IIHS 2014; Wankhade 2015). The process of devolving responsibilities and finances from

the state level has been fragmented, and ULBs often do not have the capacity for service

provision (IIHS 2014). Despite the devolution of powers in urban sanitation, the central

government retains a lot of influence in this sector; a significant portion of capital

investments in urban sanitation has come from the central government, and projects are

approved based on technical specifications constructed at the national level (IIHS 2014).

Figure 4 provides an outline of the key national-level actors in urban sanitation in

India. The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) is the primary organization

that designs, implements, and funds urban development policies, including the National

Urban Sanitation Policy and SBM. 26 The Public Health Engineering department and the

Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organization (CPHEEO) within

MoHUA provide technical assistance on water and sanitation technologies for the

Ministry and states (CPHEEO website; MoHUA website).27 CPHEEO is also vital in

“processing” water and sanitation projects funded by international financial institutions

(CPHEEO website; MoHUA website). Similar to CPHEEO, the Central Pollution Control

Board (CPCB), housed in the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change, is a

statutory organization that monitors and provides technical assistance on issues like

26 The National Urban Sanitation Policy was implemented by the Ministry of Urban Development, MoHUA’s former name. 27CPHEEO was initially part of the Ministry of Health when it was launched in 1954 under the recommendations of the Environmental Hygiene Committee, and has been part of all national sanitation efforts since then. In 1973, CPHEEO joined MoHUA, when it was known as the Ministry of Works and Housing (CPHEEO website).

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waste management, water quality management, and air quality management to central

and state governments (CPCB website). On the labor side, the Ministry of Social Justice

and Empowerment oversees policies for the manual scavenging community (PIB 2018a).

Figure 4: National actors in urban sanitation

In response to skyrocketing levels of environmental pollution as a result of rapid

industrialization and urbanization since the 1980s, the central government established

the National Green Tribunal in 2010 to efficiently adjudicate and mediate legal disputes

related to environmental protection and conservation (Vardhan 2014; NGT website). This

move was intended to operationalize a citizen’s duty to protect the environment, and a

citizen’s right to live in a healthy environment in India under Constitution Articles 51-

A(g) and 21 respectively (Vardhan 2014). In its capacity as the national mediator and

watchdog for environmental disputes, the Tribunal has recently ordered studies on

determining what constitutes toxic waste and has heard cases on the illegal dumping of

waste in water bodies by private and public actors (NGT website).

By the 1990s, urban growth in India had slowed, and primarily occurred in developed

states (Kundu 2014). This shift can be attributed to the central government’s

liberalization policies, which channeled infrastructure and industrial investments to

urban centers in these states (Kundu 2014). The central government also became

interested in transforming living conditions in larger cities to make them more attractive

for foreign and domestic investment in the 1990s and 2000s (Kundu 2014). Subsequent

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policies, including JNNURM, the National Urban Sanitation Policy, and SBM, have thus

been focusing on expanding service provision in cities (Wankhade 2015; “JNNURM

Overview”). Another policy priority has been tackling public health issues in slums that

have emerged as a result of haphazard urban planning (Wankhade 2015; SBM Manual

2017).

After decentralization in the 1990s, states were given the autonomy to design

institutions around water and sanitation provision (IIHS 2014; Wankhade 2015). In

urban areas, ULBs, most often municipal corporations in large cities, were charged with

this task. In line with Pritchett et al.’s (2010) argument that bureaucracies struggle with

implementation because they are overburdened, municipal corporations are responsible

for managing a wide variety of urban issues, ranging from infrastructure construction to

overseeing government-run schools to revenue collection.28 These ULBs are usually

headed by officials from the country’s most elite bureaucracy, the Indian Administrative

Service (IAS). In my interview with Sanitation Consultant A in Coimbatore, who has had

extensive experience working with local agencies to implement sanitation policies across

India, he asserted that IAS officers, trained to be managers and generalists, often lack the

specialist skills necessary in understanding the needs of the water and sanitation

sectors.29 Further, he pointed to how the practice of transferring IAS officers from one

post to another, either a consequence of political meddling or routine rotation, hinders

policy continuity.30 For example, during the course of my fieldwork from 2017 to 2019,

the former Commissioner of the GCC was transferred to the Commisionerate of Municipal

Administration, and is now at the Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority; both

28 The authors aptly title this the “Asking Too Much of Too Little Too Soon Too Often” syndrome. 29 Interview with Sanitation Consultant A. Coimbatore, Aug 23, 2018. 30 Ibid.

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transfers happened in 2019. This is consistent with Iyer & Mani’s (2007; 2012) work on

the role of politics in bureaucratic reassignments in India. IAS officers conventionally

remain in their positions for at least two years. Sanitation Consultant A described how

when officers assume a new leadership role, they often reinvent the wheel and revamp the

priorities in an agency based on their interests, instead of building on its previous work.

He referred to this phenomenon as a perpetual “war of egos” between IAS officers.31 As a

result, the extent to which a policy is implemented with the full force of the bureaucracy

is reduced to the will of transient leadership.

The central government has clearly articulated the roles at different levels to

implement SBM (Figure 5). At the national level, the National Advisory Committee, SBM

National Mission Directorate, and the Project Management Unit are all housed within

MoHUA. In turn, each state has a State High Powered Committee, an SBM State Mission

Directorate, and a Project Management Unit. The Committee is chaired by the state’s

Chief Secretary and has members from relevant departments. At the district level,

members of parliament, district collectors, and ULBs are tasked with implementation.

ULBs are also charged with coordinating between ward committees, resident welfare

associations (RWAs), and NGOs (SBM Manual 2017).

31 Interview with Sanitation Consultant A. Coimbatore, Aug 23, 2018.

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Figure 5: Institutional framework for SBM implementation (SBM Manual 2017)

3.3 State- and City-Level Actors in Urban Sanitation Governance in Tamil Nadu

In Tamil Nadu, SBM builds on a legacy of investments in urban sanitation

infrastructure led by state politicians that privileged community and public toilets,

colloquially referred to as CT/PTs, and underground sewerage systems.32 Urban Tamil

Nadu experiences high rates of open defecation (16%) and improper management of solid

waste services and on-site sanitation systems (TNUSSP 2017; Karthikeyan 2018). The

government exclusively addressed these challenges in the last two decades through the

construction of sanitation infrastructure in various urban development initiatives.33 The

World Bank-supported Third Tamil Nadu Urban Development Project (2005-2014),

Integrated Urban Development Mission (2011), and the Chennai Mega City Development

Mission (2011) expanded underground sewerage and storm water drains in cities (MAWS

32; Interview with Ms. Kavita Wankhade. Chennai, Nov 28, 2018; Interview with Mr. Phanindra Reddy. Chennai, Dec 6, 2018. 33 Interview with Mr. Phanindra Reddy. Chennai, Dec 6, 2018.

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2012; “Mega City Mission 2018;” World Bank TNUDP III).34 In 2013, the state

government launched the well-known Namma Toilet (“Our Toilet”) project, which aimed

to end open defecation in the state through the construction of modular, naturally

ventilated public toilets in high-traffic areas (SBM Manual 2017). While these toilets were

initially popular with the public, they have not been properly maintained by officials, and

are largely no longer in use (Srividya 2015). Mr. Phanindra Reddy, an IAS officer who

served as the Principal Secretary of Municipal Administration and Water Supply from

2014-2017, noted that maintenance has also been an issue with CT/PTs, and linked it to

incidents of vandalism and theft, poor awareness of toilet usage, and a weak sense of

ownership over the facilities.35 In particular, he described the lack of a coherent city

identity in Chennai, which draws people from all over India and the world, to explain the

absence of ownership over sanitation infrastructure.36

Despite these attempts to improve access to sanitation “hardware,” the state faces

legislative, governance, and human rights challenges in implementation (TNUSSP 2017).

Beyond the state’s 2014 Septage Management Guidelines, Tamil Nadu’s current state

laws37 governing environmental sanitation are not comprehensive enough to address its

problems (TNUSSP 2017).38 There is a need for updated, dedicated laws and policies

targeting improved sanitation and public health outcomes (TNUSSP 2017). Further, there

34 The Integrated Urban Development Mission and the Chennai Mega City Development Mission have recently been renewed (“Mega City Mission” 2018). 35 Interview with Mr. Phanindra Reddy. Chennai, Dec 6, 2018 and Mar 28, 2019. 36 Ibid. 37 The Acts in the state that currently govern urban sanitation are: 1971 Tamil Nadu Town & Country Planning Act; 1920 Tamil Nadu District Municipalities Act, 1939 Municipal Corporation Acts & 1939 Public Act; 1972 Tamil Nadu District Municipalities Building Rules; and 1986 Environment Protection Act & 1974 Water Prevention & Control of Pollution Act (TNUSSP 2017; TNUSSP 2018). 38 Tamil Nadu is one of the first states in India to recognize the importance of investing across the sanitation value chain, particularly in the often-overlooked fecal sludge management sector. These guidelines provide suggestions for the proper containment, transport, and disposal of fecal sludge from septic tanks.

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is no clear chain of command in sanitation governance in the state, which is currently

populated with multiple stakeholders and laws (TNUSSP 2017). Figure 6 shows the

organization of government stakeholders in urban sanitation in Tamil Nadu:

Figure 6: Organization of stakeholders in urban sanitation in Tamil Nadu. Adapted from TNUSSP (2016)

This figure highlights the plethora of agencies in charge of urban sanitation across the

state, and illustrates how coordination between these different stakeholders presents a

challenge for effectively planning, implementing, and enforcing sanitation policies

(TNUSSP 2018).

Further, Figure 8 demonstrates how urban sanitation in Chennai is governed

differently, compared to other cities in the state. The Chennai Corporation and the

Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (CMWSSB, colloquially known

as Metro Water) oversee urban sanitation for the city, instead of the Commissionerate of

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Municipal Administration (CMA) (TNUSSP 2018). As the largest city (land-wise and

population-wise) in the state, Chennai has a separate structure of sanitation governance

and financing. The Integrated Urban Development Mission, for example, was launched

by the CMA, and implemented improvements in sanitation infrastructure in Tamil Nadu

cities, except for Chennai (TNUSSP 2018). Instead, infrastructure improvements in

Chennai were implemented under the Chennai Mega City Development Mission (“Mega

City Mission” 2018). The Namma Toilet scheme was initiated by the CMA in cities other

than Chennai, and the first public toilet was piloted in Trichy (TNUSSP 2017). Its initial

success led to the expansion of the program in Chennai, but ultimately the scheme was

unsuccessful because of a lack of interest from the private sector in helping to finance the

program (Philip 2014).

Another implementation obstacle in the water and sanitation sector is the

relationship between the Tamil Nadu Water and Drainage Board and the ULBs. The

Board is still in charge of service provision in the state, despite the 74th Constitutional

Amendment that charges ULBs with this responsibility (TNUSSP 2017). The devolution

of service provision to ULBs is thus incomplete and fragmented, which leaves them

unable to effectively implement and finance service provision (TNUSSP 2017). Finally,

since on-site sanitation systems do not receive much attention from the government,

households have to make their own arrangements with private contractors to collect and

dispose fecal sludge (TNUSSP 2017). These operators are largely unregulated, and often

dump fecal sludge in the nearest water body (TNUSSP 2017). As a response to this dire

situation that also affects water quality in this parched state, the Tamil Nadu Urban

Sanitation Support Program (TNUSSP), in concert with the Gates Foundation, is

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supporting the state government in incorporating fecal sludge management in Tamil

Nadu’s urban sanitation strategy.

Dr. Karen Coelho from the Madras Institute of Development Studies and Ms.

Kavita Wankhade, who leads TNUSSP, described the strength and cohesion of the state

bureaucracy, compared to other Indian states.39 They pointed to successful

implementation of state policies like the mid-day meals program and rainwater

harvesting, and highlighted how agencies continue to function even in the face of political

turmoil.40 Ms. Wankhade also said that MAWS was a powerful agency in directing urban

development in the state.41 Despite the relative competence of the state bureaucracy,

coordination between agencies is a significant challenge. At the Resilient Chennai

Strategy Launch in June 2019, the former Deputy Commissioner of Works at the Chennai

Corporation identified a lack of coordination between agencies in the state as an

impediment in policy implementation, and said that few mechanisms exist for agencies

to coordinate with each other.42 He pointed to the potential of national policies like Smart

Cities to function as a platform for inter-agency coordination, bringing together the

expertise and mandates of various agencies to implement urban development policies.43

While Ms. Wankhade maintained that inter-agency coordination was better in

Tamil Nadu compared to other states in India, she agreed with Dr. Coelho’s assessment

of the “culture of top-down-ness,” entrenched in the deeply hierarchical state

39 Interview with Ms. Kavita Wankhade. Chennai, Nov 28, 2018 and Jul 3, 2019; Interview with Dr. Karen Coelho. Chennai, Jul 6, 2019. 40 Ibid 41 Interview with Ms. Kavita Wankhade. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019. 42 Resilient Chennai Strategy Launch. Chennai, Jun 27, 2019. 43 Ibid

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bureaucracy.44 Both of them stressed the need for buy-in at the state level in order to

effectively implement a policy.45 Dr. Coelho also noted that overburdened ULBs in Tamil

Nadu “strenuously resist coordination” because of the staggering workload involved in

fulfilling their agency’s mandate, reinforcing Pritchett et al.’s (2010) and Bach and

Wegrich (2019) insights on bureaucratic capacity and implementation silos.46 Dr. Coelho

described institutional coordination in Tamil Nadu as a project-based endeavor

spearheaded by the state government, and pointed to the Chennai Rivers Restoration

Trust (CRRT) as the existing model of inter-agency coordination in the city’s water and

sanitation sector.47 Launched in 2006, CRRT was created by the state government to

specifically overcome coordination issues in the environmental sector to construct an eco-

park and conduct river restoration in Chennai. The directors of CRRT are secretaries from

relevant state departments like the Public Works Department, MAWS, and the

Environment and Forests Department (CRRT website). The state-level sub-committee

includes the managing director of CMWSSB, the Greater Chennai Corporation

Commissioner, and the managing director of the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board

(CRRT website). This committee oversees the work of the technical committee, which is

made up of the superintending engineers of the various state departments and agencies

involved in the project (CRRT website). CRRT is feted as a standard-bearer of

institutional coordination in Tamil Nadu policy circles because of its highly visible

achievements in successfully building and maintaining a large eco-park in a central part

44 Interview with Ms. Kavita Wankhade. Chennai, Nov 28, 2018 and Jul 3, 2019; Interview with Dr. Karen Coelho. Chennai, Jul 6, 2019. Quote from Dr. Coelho. 45 Ibid. 46 Interview with Dr. Karen Coelho. Chennai, Jul 6, 2019. 47 Ibid.

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of Chennai, and for its ongoing efforts to work with slum dwellers as part of its mission to

restore the Adyar and Cooum rivers (Resilient Chennai 2019; Pattabiraman 2017).

In addition to coordination challenges in sanitation implementation, the

persistence of manual scavenging remains a significant blind spot in Tamil Nadu. The

state reportedly has the highest number of manual scavengers in the country – 462 as of

2015, although manual scavengers dispute this figure as being less than a tenth of the real

number (Bajaj & Venugopalan 2018).48 Numbers of manual scavengers reported by state

and central governments vary wildly in an attempt to cover up manual scavenging

practices. For example, the 2011 census reported that around 2.1 million toilets needed to

be cleaned manually in the country but the total number of manual scavengers was only

estimated to be 13, 639 (Shaikh 2018). Several states like Bihar, Telengana, and Haryana

have even claimed that they have no manual scavengers (Mishra 2018). It is thus possible

that Tamil Nadu has the highest reported numbers, simply because the state has been

more forthcoming about its data. The state government has made half-hearted attempts

to survey the number of manual scavengers but there has been no real commitment from

its side to address the concerns of this community and actively help in its rehabilitation

(Bajaj & Venugopalan 2018). When the Safai Karamchari Andolan (SKA), the preeminent

activist NGO on manual scavenging issues, gave a list of 3032 names to the Tamil Nadu

government, officials allegedly used the list to threaten and harass people (Bajaj &

Venugopalan 2018). While SBM mentions the rehabilitation of manual scavengers in

policy documents, there is little action on the ground despite Prime Minister Modi

wielding the broom in photo opportunities in an effort to destigmatize waste workers.

48 For more details on the politics of counting manual scavengers, see: Mishra (2018) and Shaikh (2018).

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Thus, at both the central government and state levels, manual scavengers continue to be

neglected at best and persecuted at worst in sanitation interventions.

In the next three sections, I present my findings on how national and state actors

work together with local agencies to implement SBM. First, I discuss how bureaucratic

capacity and administrative coherence are limiting factors in the agencies’ use of SBM’s

reputational devices. Then, I explain how the emphasis on documentation and the general

interest nation-wide in sanitation issues as a result of SBM, particularly in solid waste

management, has improved coordination between national actors and local agencies.

3.4 Horizontal Coordination and Bureaucratic Capacity in Tamil Nadu

Reinforcing the “Tick-Box” Culture:49 Documentation and Online Platforms in SBM

Many of the bureaucrats I spoke to in Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy were

indeed “Lord[s] of the Files,”50 their desks and offices overflowing with stacks of papers

and files. Figures 7 and 8 taken in Chennai and Coimbatore provide a taste of the massive

number of documents that are collected and transported throughout and between

agencies. Documentation of tasks constitutes a large part of an agency’s daily work, and

SBM’s reputational devices have added to this, intensifying its existing workload.

49 Phone interview with Mr. Somnath Sen. Chennai, Dec 14, 2018. 50 This is a reference to India Today’s cover story on Indian bureaucrats called “Lords of the Files” described in Chapter 2 (Jha 2018).

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Figure 7: Sacks of files at the Chennai Corporation being transported to another building (Photo by author)

Figure 8: Papers piled up in the corner of an office at the Coimbatore Corporation (Photo by author)

Ms. Reeba Devraj and Dr. Suneethi Sundar at the Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation

Support Program (TNUSSP) asserted that bureaucratic capacity is a major stumbling

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block in inter-agency coordination for sanitation in the state.51 They pointed out that

while SBM has strengthened the mandate for sanitation, it has not enhanced the ability

of bureaucracies to take on more tasks.52 Officials at the Chennai Corporation and the

Trichy Corporation who are leading the implementation of SBM in their cities, for

example, noted that they are fulfilling the Swachh Survekshan indicators on top of their

existing workload, which include the daily management of solid waste and addressing

citizen requests.53 There were no new positions created within agencies solely dedicated

to SBM implementation. This finding is consistent with the literatures on public

administration and bureaucratic coordination on how the nature of bureaucracies and

their capacity affect coordination. Bach & Wegrich (2018) emphasize that agencies have

distinct mandates, which is their primary focus, and that coordination with other agencies

is not part of their performance evaluation. Pritchett et al. (2010) also highlight how

policy implementation becomes unsuccessful if governments continue to push through

policies on overburdened bureaucracies without first improving administrative capacity.

In effect, SBM’s reputational devices have actually exacerbated two aspects of

bureaucratic capacity in the three cities: amplifying the burden of documentation and the

“tick-box” culture. SBM strives for accountability and transparency in its quest to reform

Indian sanitation. At the level of agencies, this has taken the form of increased

documentation that needs to be uploaded to the SBM portal for the Swachh Survekshan

rankings. As a point of reference, Swachh Survekshan 2019 had 33 distinct indicators,

listed in Appendix C, each with a different set of paperwork needed for evaluation

51 Interview with Ms. Reeba Devaraj and Dr. Suneethi Sundar, Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Program. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019. 52 Ibid. 53 Interview with SBM Team, Greater Chennai Corporation, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with Trichy City Corporation officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019.

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(Swachh Surekshan 2019 Toolkit). Officials at all three municipal corporations

acknowledged that the implementation of SBM necessitated a significant increase in

paperwork,54 but it was the Deputy Commissioner of Health at the Greater Chennai

Corporation who eloquently critiqued it in a question to an SBM administrator at a waste

conference in Chennai: Is SBM about cleanliness or documentation?55 His question

(which elicited many emphatic nods from other bureaucrats in the audience and received

a vague answer) implies a tradeoff in agencies between bureaucrats spending their time

collecting paperwork for the annual Swachh Survekshan exercise and focusing on

substantive tasks that improve the implementation of sanitation interventions.

This emphasis on documentation has also intensified the “tick-box” culture within

agencies.56 This refers to the tendency bureaucracies have in focusing exclusively on

checking off narrow tasks and indicators in their list of duties, without paying attention

to their usefulness or larger significance. In SBM, this mechanical checking off of boxes is

most evident in the rush to declare cities and states open-defecation-free (ODF) in Tamil

Nadu. Attaining 100 percent ODF status by Gandhi’s 150th birthday in 2019 has been one

of the policy’s most publicized and controversial goals; supporters welcome the

realization of the independence leader’s dream of a clean India, and critics question the

effectiveness of this target in improving outcomes along the environmental sanitation

spectrum in the country (Dewoolkar 2018; Sanan 2016). To achieve ODF status under

SBM, urban local bodies (ULBs) first declare themselves ODF based on the policy’s

protocols (SBM ODF website). Then, a third-party verification team from the Quality

54 Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018; Interview with SBM Team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018. 55 Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Roadmap to Zero Waste in Chennai. Chennai, Nov 9 and 10, 2018. 56 Phone interview with Mr. Somnath Sen. Chennai, Dec 14, 2018.

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Council of India verifies their status in person, and submits a report and certificate on the

SBM-ODF Dashboard (SBM ODF website). This certification is valid for six months to

ensure that ULBs continue to monitor incidences of open defecation (SBM ODF website).

In line with other Indian cities, Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy have all declared their

ODF status (SBM ODF website). However, there is some cognitive dissonance in

bureaucracies between what the ODF status means under SBM and what “real” ODF looks

like. For instance, officials at the Coimbatore and Chennai Corporations noted that the

ODF certification has motivated their bureaucracies to identify and monitor areas with

high incidences of ODF, to enforce fines for public urination and open defecation, and to

channel resources into improving toilets in those areas.57 However, they also recognized

that SBM’s ODF certification did not translate into ODF cities in reality, a goal they

acknowledged that can only be achieved with much more time and resources.58 After all,

as Mr. Phanindra Reddy noted, “sanitation is not a five-year affair.”59 This discrepancy

between what ODF means in SBM’s world of rankings and indicators, and what it means

in the real world undermines the value of this certification and status, and casts doubt on

the ability of SBM’s indicators and certifications to effect change on the ground. As

Dewoolkar (2018) emphasizes in her critique of Mumbai’s ODF declaration, attaining

ODF is a “self-congratulatory” move for an agency, rather than translating into real world

improvement. It highlights the performative dimension of an agency’s reputation,

perhaps only to other agencies, SBM administrators, and the central government, without

demonstrating the agency’s technical or moral commitments to increasing toilet usage

57 Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018. 58 Ibid. 59 Interview with Mr. Phanindra Reddy. Chennai, Dec 6, 2018.

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and ending open defecation. In short, the audience that is privileged in ODF declarations

appear to be SBM administrators and not the public.

The NGOs I spoke with had a different perspective on the benefit of ODF targets in

improving sanitation. Officials at both Gramalaya and Scope in Trichy agreed that SBM’s

ODF declarations did not accurately reflect reality and were results of performative

politics.60 For example, Mr. Elangovan from Gramalaya remarked that “the government

will just declare ODF status [in 2019] and then move on to the next scheme. This is just

politics.”61 Mr. Elangovan was right. Prime Minister Modi claimed on October 2, 2019,

that India had achieved ODF status on schedule and was given the Global Goalkeeper

Award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (AFP 2019; Doshi 2019). However,

Mr. Damodaran, the Chief Executive Officer of Gramalaya, emphasized that ODF targets

were not the issue but the manner in which they are executed.62 He pointed to how

Gramlaya has been using the ODF status as an incentive in its work within Tamil Nadu

since the 1990s. He described how NGO teams worked closely with residents, other

NGOs, and local agencies to build sanitation facilities and cultivate toilet usage. In these

visits, NGO officials also elucidated the links between open defecation and poor health in

the area, particularly for children. Once the neighborhood had fully transitioned toward

using toilets and open defecation had been eliminated, Gramalaya issued them with

banners with this achievement, which are proudly displayed outside the neighborhood

(Figure 9). Mr. Damodaran also highlighted that the NGO’s work did not end there. They

60 Interview with Mr. Sai Damodaran. Trichy, Sep 5, 2018; Interview with Mr. M. Subburaman. Trichy, May 29, 2019. 61 Interview with Gramalaya team. Trichy, Sep 6, 2018. 62 Interview with Mr. Sai Damodaran. Trichy, Sep 5, 2018.

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plan visits every few years to these ODF areas to ensure that residents continue to use

toilet facilities without any problems.63

Figure 9: An example of an ODF certification assigned in 2008 by Gramalaya and partner NGOs in Salem, Tamil Nadu (Bansal 2015)

The difference between Gramalaya’s ODF certifications and SBM’s illustrate the

difference between “thin” and “thick” tasks in sanitation (Pritchett 2014). SBM’s

certification rests on a layer of “thin” indicators, including the number of individual

household latrines and the verification that a system is in place to enforce fines for open

defecation. It does not test for the “thick,” transaction-intensive methodology Gramalaya

employs to ensure that residents understand the meaning of this certification and work

towards achieving and maintaining it with the relevant agencies and other NGOs. While

broad declarations of ODF across India feed into the publicity SBM has generated for

sanitation, they also dilute the meaning of what this indicator means and obfuscates the

amount of work that is needed to be truly ODF.

63 Interview with Mr. Sai Damodaran. Trichy, Sep 5, 2018.

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Social Media: The Magic Bullet to Behavioral Change?

SBM and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have made social media a hallmark of

policy implementation, touting its effectiveness in creating nation-wide behavioral

change (Jha 2017; Thakurta & Sam 2019; SBM website). Swachh Survekshan rewards the

use of its online platforms in its indicators, particularly in those measuring citizen

feedback and innovative implementation strategies (Swachh Survekshan Toolkit 2019).

In Trichy, the Corporation’s use of social media is in line with the “tick-box”64 culture. The

Trichy Corporation and its former Commissioner, Mr. N. Ravichandran, have accounts

on YouTube and Twitter, and have used these platforms for public outreach. However, a

closer look at the analytics for these platforms reveals that while the Corporation is indeed

employing social media, its online audience is limited. The Trichy Corporation’s YouTube

account was started a year ago, and contains posts exclusively devoted to raising

awareness about SBM and Swachh Survekshan.65 The Corporation hosted a short movie

contest in 2018 on the importance of sanitation in the city, and the top three videos are

posted on its account. Further, the agency uses this account to publicize the various SBM

interventions it has undertaken in the city, like building and cleaning up parks, and invites

community leaders to make short videos on keeping Trichy clean. The account also posts

videos by these community leaders and the former Commissioner in detailing the

questions residents may be asked by the third-party verification team for the Swachh

Survekshan rankings.

These videos, as a whole, check off three out of five dimensions of organizational

reputation. They raise the visibility of the agency’s SBM efforts (performative), they

64 Phone interview with Mr. Somnath Sen. Chennai, Dec 14, 2018. 65 Trichy Corporation YouTube channel

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highlight its technical and professional capacity to implement sanitation interventions

(technical), and they use community leaders to emphasize how residents are integral to

the city’s success in the rankings (emotional). These videos thus have the capacity to

nudge mental models of the agency held by Trichy’s residents who may view the

Corporation as perennially corrupt and ineffective. However, the impact of these videos

is limited by the small size of online audience. The Corporation’s YouTube account has

1,050 subscribers, and most of its videos have received less than 200 views in a city that

has almost a million people. While the first video received over 15,000 views in February

2018, there has been a general trend downward in the number of views, with the most

recent one posted in November 2019 receiving 55 views.

The Trichy Corporation’s and the former Commissioner’s Twitter accounts are

equally limited in their online reach.66 The Trichy Corporation’s Twitter account has

2,007 followers, and it follows 10 other accounts. These 10 accounts are chiefly of the

Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, State Minister for Municipal Administration Mr.

S.P. Velumani, and other municipal corporations in India. The agency posts about its

various SBM endeavors and highlights articles in the English and Tamil newspapers that

describe its sanitation efforts. While the agency has posted 523 tweets since July 2016, it

generally receives less than 50 likes, 10 retweets, and 1 comment per post. Similarly, the

former Commissioner has posted 307 tweets since November 2017 on the agency’s

various water, sanitation, and health initiatives, but has 642 followers. His posts also

receive less than 50 likes, 10 retweets, and 1 comment per post. The number of people

reached by the Trichy Corporation’s social media presence suggests that social media may

66 Trichy Corporation’s Twitter account and Trichy Commissioner’s Twitter account

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not be the most effective platform for behavioral change communication in the city. The

discrepancy between the consistent posting and the small online audience also extends

Pritchett et al.’s (2010) concept of isomorphic mimicry to the digital sphere. While the

Trichy Corporation presents a façade of active communication online, perhaps mimicking

Prime Minister Modi’s substantial Twitter presence that has infused SBM, its limited

interactions question its effectiveness as a communication strategy. In short, maintaining

a social media presence does not automatically translate into improved communication

or behavioral change.

The inconsistency between an online platform and its reach is also evident with the

use of the Swachhata app in Chennai and Trichy. The app is intended to streamline

communication between municipal corporations and residents in improving service

provision and addressing problems in sanitation in a timely manner. The SBM team in

Chennai noted that the former Commissioner Dr. D. Karthikeyan was attentive to the

app’s data and emphasized the necessity of fast resolutions of complaints lodged through

it.67 To increase the app’s reach, it was linked with the Namma Chennai (Our Chennai)

app, developed by the Chennai Corporation and Chennai Smart City Limited in 2018.68

Despite these efforts, the usage data tells a different story. During my fieldwork from 2017

to 2019, a senior GCC official and sanitation consultant in the city estimated the number

of app downloads between 10,000 and 20,000, with estimates falling between 12,000 and

15,000.69 For reference, the city’s population is between 4 and 8 million, depending on

how the city is defined and if people considered to be part of the floating population are

67 Interview with Ms. D. Vijula. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018. 68 Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018. 69 Senior Bureaucrat A. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Sanitation Consultant C. Chennai, Mar 25, 2019.

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included in the figure.70 While the indicators in Swachh Survekshan 2019, detailed in

Appendix C, measure both the number of active users and the number of downloads, the

number of approximate downloads versus the total city population indicates that the app

is not widely used.

Some of the bureaucrats I interviewed were not completely convinced by the

effectiveness of the app in helping them fulfill their mandate. For example, in Trichy,

officials have expanded the use of WhatsApp to communicate with the public on SBM-

related issues, declaring it a more convenient and accessible platform for both the agency

and residents.71 WhatsApp is widely used in India, both as a communication tool and as a

social media platform, and its usage cuts across geographical, class, and age categories.

The Swachhata app, on the other hand, requires users to first know about the app and

then know how to download and use it. In my experience using the app on my Android

phone in India, I found the interface easy to navigate, and reported a couple of complaints

about overflowing dumpsters in my neighborhood that were resolved within a day.

However, there were not many complaints lodged in the app. The number of requests for

service usually hovered between 40 to 50 per day across the city, including as recently as

November 4, 2019. While the app can be a useful tool for people who use their

smartphones frequently, it can be inaccessible or challenging for those who do not.

Public communication efforts in the three cities did not exclusively privilege online

platforms. The Trichy Corporation officials I spoke with who are implementing SBM also

reported that the Commissioner and senior engineers from the agency have increased

their frequency of field visits to ward offices and to neighborhood behavioral change

70 The floating population in Chennai is estimated to be around a million by the Chennai Corporation, consisting of migrant and seasonal workers from other parts of Tamil Nadu and India. 71 Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018.

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campaigns held by the Corporation and NGOs.72 In Coimbatore and Chennai, schools and

slums are focal points in the agencies’ behavioral change campaigns, and these agencies

do not prioritize energetic social media usage. Bureaucrats in Chennai, in particular, have

consciously chosen to pursue offline interventions over offline ones in behavioral change.

Mr. Phanindra Reddy, former Principal Secretary of MAWS, and Dr. Srinivasan, who

heads up the information, education, and communication (IEC) initiatives for SBM,

questioned the ability of social media to effect change in the real world. Dr. Srinivasan

declared that sanitation problems need be solved at the grassroots level when officials can

“meet people one-on-one.”73 Mr. Reddy reinforced this perspective, maintaining that

people in most need of sanitation services are not active social media users.74

The emphasis on schools and slums in Chennai is not new. Dr. Srinivasan

emphasized that the educating children on multiple topics, including voter education and

sanitation, leads to cascading benefits; these students will then put pressure on their

families to improve their habits and will grow up to be environmentally and socially

conscious adults.75 In addition to students, the Chennai Corporation also works with slum

dwellers, coordinating with the Slum Clearance Board. Focusing on the environmental

health of slums has been a priority at the Chennai Corporation before SBM, and street

plays demonstrating the importance of latrine use and hand washing were employed as

outreach mechanisms, in concert with the Slum Clearance Board.76 Officials at the

Chennai Corporation noted that while they have expanded their presence in slums, they

72 Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018. 73 Interview with Dr. Srinivasan. Chennai, Mar 26, 2019. 74 Interview with Mr. Phanindra Reddy. Chennai, Mar 28, 2019. 75 Interview with Dr. Srinivasan. Chennai, Mar 26, 2019. 76 Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018.

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still find it difficult to enforce fines for littering or open defecation because of interference

and threats from local politicians.77

3.5 Administrative Coherence and Horizontal and Intra-Agency Coordination in Tamil Nadu Besides bureaucratic capacity, inter-agency coordination is impacted by existing

silos and hierarchies in public administration in Tamil Nadu. The state government,

which has the authority to mandate cooperation between agencies, has not created any

formal mechanisms for coordination specifically dedicated to SBM implementation. This

is a problem particularly in Chennai because of the administrative division between the

Chennai Corporation and Metro Water. Table 3 summarizes the findings on inter-agency

coordination in Chennai Coimbatore and Trichy:

Inter-Agency Coordination

Chennai Coimbatore Trichy

CMA Ideal Ideal Ideal YES YES YES

TNSCB Ideal Ideal Ideal YES NO NO

Metro Water Ideal N/A N/A NO

TWAD N/A Ideal Ideal NO NO

Black refers to ideal coordination. Red refers to my findings on coordination under SBM during the study period from 2017 to 2019.

Table 3: Summary of inter-agency coordination relationships

This table illustrates how all three municipal corporations are coordinating with the

Commisionerate of Municipal Administration (CMA) to implement SBM, which is not a

77 Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018.

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new relationship.78 The Chennai Corporation has built on its existing relationship with

the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB), but the Coimbatore and Trichy

Corporations reported no new partnerships for SBM.79 The latter two agencies also

reported no new partnerships with the Tamil Nadu Water and Drainage Board (TWAD)

for SBM.80 Further, the Chennai Corporation did not report coordinating with Metro

Water to implement SBM.81

When discussing Chennai’s performance in Swachh Survekshan and the

certifications it is working toward, the SBM team said that while the city has achieved

ODF status and was working toward ODF+ status, it probably would not be able to attain

ODF++ since it required extensive coordination with Metro Water.82 The ODF+

certification, which is the next level from ODF, focuses on the quality of public and

community toilets (SBM ODF Toolkit). ODF++ evaluates a city on how effective its

sewage system is, which falls under the purview of Metro Water in Chennai (SBM ODF

Toolkit). The SBM team at the Chennai Corporation said that their connection to Metro

Water was limited, and that they could not ask the organization to coordinate with them.83

Senior Bureaucrat A at the Chennai Corporation also mentioned that before Metro Water

can think of coordinating with other agencies, it needed to tackle its many challenges.84

He was referring to Metro Water’s highly publicized failures in water provision in the city,

which regularly careens between floods and droughts. Dr. Karen Coelho from the Madras

78 Interview with Ms. D. Vijula. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019; Phone interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019. 79 Ibid. 80 Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019; Phone interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019. 81 Interview with Ms. D. Vijula. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018. 82 Interview with Ms. D. Vijula. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018. 83 Interview with Ms. D. Vijula. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018. 84 Interview with Senior Bureaucrat A. Chennai Nov 23, 2018.

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Institute of Development Studies added that engineers from both the Corporation and

Metro Water work together at the zonal level, but that the two agencies did not frequently

coordinate at the organizational level.85 The lure of ODF++ thus is not powerful enough

to encourage coordination between the two agencies, as envisioned by SBM. This lack of

coordination bolsters Chibber’s (2012) critique of how fragmented relationships between

Indian agencies are a stumbling block in policy implementation, and his assertion that

proper relationships between agencies first need to be established before they start

fulfilling their mandate.

Coordination between the Chennai Corporation and the Slum Clearance Board has

built on the relationship between the two agencies that existed before SBM. The Health

Department at the Corporation, which oversees SBM implementation in Chennai, is also

in charge of school and slum health, the other two targets of behavioral change campaigns

in the city as previously mentioned. According to the SBM nodal officer at the Chennai

Corporation, one of the benefits of SBM was the strengthened relationship between the

agency and the Slum Clearance Board in improving environmental sanitation in the slums

using both supply- and demand-side interventions.86 In Coimbatore and Trichy,

coordination with the Slum Clearance Board happens on a project basis, and agencies in

both cities reported no specific projects for SBM.

While my fieldwork focused on understanding relationships between agencies

under SBM, bureaucrats in Trichy raised the issue of changes within the agency in

response to the policy. I then followed up with the other two municipal corporations on

possible internal changes. Intra-agency coordination in the three cities also built on

85 Interview with Dr. Karen Coelho. Chennai, Jul 6, 2019. 86 Interview with Ms. D. Vijula. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018.

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partnerships that existed before SBM. The SBM team in the Health Department and an

Assistant Executive Engineer in the Solid Waste Management Department at the Chennai

Corporation reported that the two have always shared a close relationship, which has been

helpful in implementing SBM.87 Similarly, in Coimbatore and Trichy, officials familiar

with SBM said that the Solid Waste Management and Engineering Departments have

natural overlaps in their work and have worked closely before SBM.88 There was no

change in the frequency of meetings between these departments for SBM

implementation. Officials in Trichy in charge of SBM did highlight that that the former

Commissioner Mr. N. Ravichandran tasked the entire agency, the Revenue Department

in particular because they have the most face time with the public, to help raise awareness

among residents about SBM and Swachh Survekshan.89 This was most likely for the

question in the citizen feedback part of the indicators that asks residents if they have

heard of SBM or the rankings (Appendix C). Further, the Trichy Commissioner ordered

an inter-departmental task force in 2018, consisting of eight sanitary officers, executive

engineers, and assistant executive engineers, to ensure that the agency would fare better

in the 2019 rankings (Karthik 2018). This was in response to its performance in the 2018

rankings, when it lost marks on documentation (Karthik 2018). Other than these changes

in Trichy, SBM’s reputational tools have not significantly disrupted coordination patterns

between and within agencies.

87 Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with Assistant Executive Engineer. Chennai, Dec 21, 2018. 88 Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019; Phone interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019. 89 Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018.

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3.6 Making National Policies Feel Local: Vertical Coordination Between Cities in Tamil Nadu and the Central Government

SBM’s emphasis on documentation and monitoring has strengthened

communication and coordination between the three ULBs in Tamil Nadu and the central

government. In a decentralized country with ethnolinguistic and geopolitical fault lines

resulting in tensions between North and South India and between Hindi speakers and

everyone else, city bureaucrats may not feel a sense of ownership over national-level

policies. An official from the Coimbatore Corporation familiar with SBM favorably

compared it to JNNURM in promoting vertical coordination between city agencies and

the central government.90 They noted that under JNNURM, city bureaucrats would

mechanically implement central government policies since it was included in their list of

tasks. SBM was different. The policy’s advertising materials for ULBs were published in a

variety of regional languages, not just in Hindi and English, making it easier for

bureaucrats to study them in their language of choice.91 Mr. Kowshik Ganesh from Athena

Infonomics, a global development consultant organization, reinforced this perspective

and added that unlike JNNURM, SBM provided rigorous guidelines for data collection

for agencies.92 These documents can largely be found online on the various SBM Urban

websites, and cover a wide variety of topics from uploading the necessary data to the

Swachh Survekshan Management Information System, preparation for direct observation

visits, and navigating SBM’s portals to apply for the various certifications. SBM

administrators have also used WhatsApp to create an online community for key SBM

bureaucrats in municipal corporations across India as a platform to exchange reports on

90 Interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018. 91 Ibid. 92 Interview with Mr. Kowshik Ganesh. Chennai, Mar 25, 2019.

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best practices and to remind agencies of upcoming deadlines for document submission.93

The Coimbatore Corporation official declared that these efforts to respect context

sensitivity in policy implementation have helped in bridging the psychological distance

between New Delhi and Tamil Nadu, and in acknowledging the prominent role of local

bureaucracies in implementation.94 Through mandating regular uploading of data on the

SBM portal and sending direct observation teams for Swachh Survekshan to coordinate

with ULBs, the central government has improved its communication with city

bureaucracies through the expansion of vertical accountability mechanisms.

Vertical coordination between agencies in Tamil Nadu and the central government

has been particularly prominent in solid waste management because of the 2016 Solid

Waste Management Rules from the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate

Change and the emergence of the National Green Tribunal as a powerful force in

disciplining entities that flout these guidelines. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court

cracked down on states which did not frame its own solid waste guidelines, as directed by

the 2016 Rules (Sambyal 2018; “No Construction” 2018). The court stopped construction

activities in some states and imposed fines on others, including Tamil Nadu, deeming

their failure to comply with the order from the Ministry, “pathetic” (“No Construction”

2018). This motivated the Tamil Nadu state government to develop its own solid waste

management guidelines in the same year (TN Govt Gazette 2018; Gautham 2019;

Sambyal 2018b). Officials at the Chennai and Trichy Corporations overseeing SBM

pointed to the helpfulness of these rules and guidelines in overhauling solid waste

93 Interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018. 94 Interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018.

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management in their cities.95 The Chennai Corporation finished the revision of its solid

waste by-laws in 2019, in response to the national-level and state-level rules and

guidelines.

Officials at the Trichy Corporation said that trust between the agency and the

public significantly improved under changes in solid waste management rules triggered

by SBM.96 For example, they pointed to their extensive rollout of household-level waste

segregation efforts, which combined behavioral change education for households and

expanding the capacity of ward-level waste collection and processing facilities. This

change in perception of the Trichy Corporation is an example of how the implementation

of waste segregation highlighted the professional competence of the agency in the eyes of

the public, improving the technical dimension of its reputation. Mr. Subburaman from

the Scope NGO in Trichy emphasized that the reciprocity of the public in Trichy in

appreciating and cooperating with the agency’s initiatives has helped “habitualize” solid

waste management within the Corporation, which will continue even after SBM has

ended.97 This “habitualization” is a result of the national-level push to address solid waste

from the National Green Tribunal combined with the interest in the sector demonstrated

by the former Trichy Commissioner Mr. Ravichandran that was strengthened by SBM’s

mandate. The agency indeed has gone on to incorporate solid waste management

priorities in the implementation of other policies, like its Smart Cities project on bio-

mining at the Ariyamangalam dump. Further, after he was transferred to the Avadi

Corporation in late 2019 as its Commissioner, Mr. Ravichandran has continued to

95 Interview with Assistant Executive Engineer, Chennai Corporation. Chennai, Dec 21, 2018; Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019. 96 Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018. 97 Interview with Mr. M. Subburaman. Trichy, May 29, 2019.

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integrate his commitment to solid waste management by introducing plogging to the

running groups in the area, and by overseeing behavioral change campaigns to promote

source segregation and home composting (Figures 10 and 11).

Figure 10: Post on plogging from the Commissioner’s Twitter account, dated Jan 4, 2020

Figure 11: Post on solid waste management activities from the Commissioner’s Twitter account, dated Dec 12, 2019

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Officials at the Trichy Corporation also identified the role of the National Green

Tribunal in motivating solid waste management activities in Tamil Nadu.98 They noted

that the Tribunal has become more active since 2017 in monitoring how cities are

managing solid waste under SBM. Effective and scientific management of solid waste is a

top priority in the Tribunal, which ordered the Joint Secretary of SBM at MoHUA in 2018

to explain why the 2016 Rules were failing to address India’s burgeoning waste problem

(NDTV 2018). The enhanced focus on effective solid waste management by the Tribunal

has increased the pressure on SBM and city agencies to address this challenge at the

ground level. Together with the monitoring by national-level administrators, the National

Green Tribunal helps bridge the administrative space between city agencies and the

central government, making national policies feel more local.

3.7 Concluding Remarks

In Chennai, the lack of coordination between the municipal corporation and Metro

Water is related to administrative incoherence, that was not impacted by the SBM

indicators and rankings. However, the policy did provide an opportunity for the Chennai

Corporation to strengthen its existing relationship with the Slum Clearance Board to work

on slum health interventions. In Coimbatore and Trichy, there were no new projects

reported with the Water and Drainage Board or the Slum Clearance Board for SBM, again

indicating the lack of administrative coherence within the state. SBM’s reputational

98 Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019.

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devices had no effect here either. In all three cities, there were no state-driven efforts to

address inter-agency coordination to fulfill SBM’s aims.

The usage of social media differed across the three cities. Trichy was the most

enthusiastic about it, although its social media presence had limited reach. If the agency

is not reaching a significant proportion of the city’s population through its YouTube and

Twitter presence, then who is its intended audience? The Trichy Corporation’s social

media presence suggests that, at least online, the primary audience that is being privileged

in the implementation of SBM are the SBM administrators who are awarding marks for

the use of social media in the rankings. On the other end of the spectrum, the Chennai

Corporation viewed social media outreach in SBM as a questionable tool for behavioral

change, and not as a reputational strategy for the city rankings. The audiences prioritized

here, given the Chennai Corporation’s decision to focus on in-person behavioral change

campaigns, are schools and slums where these campaigns are organized. In terms of social

media usage, the Coimbatore Corporation was in the middle with a Twitter and Facebook

presence, but posted sporadically for SBM.

The three cases also highlight how reputational strategies can exacerbate extant

institutional weaknesses. Maintaining a social media presence and collecting

documentation for the Swachh Survekshan indicators under SBM add to the existing

workload of agencies, and do not necessarily lead to coordination attempts with other

agencies or to improved sanitation outcomes on the ground. This is partly a result of the

policy framing a “thick” sector like sanitation in terms of multiple “thin” tasks, ranging

from app and social media usage to the range of indicators in the city rankings that seek

to measure everything from the welfare of sanitation workers and slum beautification

projects to waste segregation and the quality of public toilets. SBM may seek to uplift and

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overhaul sanitation in India, but reputational devices are mere Band Aids on the bullet

wounds already embedded in urban sanitation governance in the country.

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4| AGENCY-NGO COORDINATON IN TAMIL NADU

4.1 Introduction Unlike previous sanitation policies, SBM has emphasized how sanitation is a

shared social responsibility in India, highlighting the role of non-governmental actors in

rolling out sanitation reforms in concert with the municipal corporations tasked to

implement SBM. In this chapter, I explore if and how agencies in the three cities

coordinate with NGOs. During my fieldwork period, there were no sanitation NGOs in

Chennai. In Coimbatore, there is an existing network of water, sanitation, and

environmental NGOs that work closely with the municipal corporation. I interviewed

three NGOs in this network that predominantly focus on toilet construction and usage

and solid waste management: RAAC, Toilet First, and No Dumping. There were two

additional NGOs I spoke with that were oriented toward lake restoration efforts, but were

heavily involved in the network’s SBM initiatives. In Trichy, I interviewed the two main

sanitation NGOs - Gramalaya and Scope. In all three cities, different aspects of historical

context emerged as explanations for agency-NGO coordination or non-coordination.

These aspects included prioritizing private sector partnerships in urban development, city

identity, and a history of environmental activism that predates SBM. In Coimbatore and

Trichy, matching between the agency’s solid waste management priorities and NGOs’

expertise was an issue in determining coordination. Further, political interference in the

Coimbatore Corporation has led to an empowered NGO network in the city, strengthened

by both SBM’s sanitation mandate and senior bureaucrats at the agency. During my

fieldwork period, Tamil Nadu did not have any mayors or ward councilors. According to

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the NGOs and bureaucrats in the three cities, the impact of public representatives on

sanitation implementation was mixed before SBM.

4.2 Political Meddling and Embedded NGOs in Coimbatore During my first visit to Coimbatore for fieldwork in July 2018, I heard the phrase

“political interference” repeatedly from NGO leaders in the city, darkly uttered with a

meaningful look. I was perplexed by the ominous vagueness until I asked NGO Leader A

to kindly clarify who exactly was interfering in what, why, and how.99 His explanation

revealed that the city was under the control of one man. The man turned out to be

Coimbatore’s Lord Voldemort, Mr. S.P. Velumani.100 He is currently the State Minister

for Municipal Administration, Rural Development, and Implementation of Special

Programs, and an MLA for the Thondamuthur constituency in Coimbatore. Mr. Velumani

is also a member of the AIADMK, the party currently in power in Tamil Nadu, and is on

the board of Metro Water in Chennai. His diverse set of affiliations in state and local

politics and city bureaucracies render him a powerful force in Tamil Nadu.

NGO Leaders A and B and officials at the Coimbatore Corporation familiar with

water and sanitation projects described how Mr. Velumani’s influence has hobbled the

agency’s ability to improve sanitation under SBM.101 While the Corporation has

announced several initiatives to expand solid waste management since the policy went

into effect, the agency has not followed through on improving service provision

(Madhavan 2019). This resulted in Coimbatore’s ranking in Swachh Survekshan 2019

slipping from 16th in 2017 and 2018 to 40th place (Swachh Survekshan 2019 website). The

99 Interview with NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018. 100 Lord Voldemort is the main villain in the popular Harry Potter series written by J.K. Rowling. 101 Interview with NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with NGO Leader B. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018. Interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018.

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decline in the city’s position prompted a blame game between officials and civic activists.

The agency claimed that the lack of public participation in the citizen feedback indicators,

measuring user engagement and happiness with the app and residents’ perceptions of

improvements in cleanliness in their neighborhoods, caused Coimbatore to perform badly

(Ramkumar 2019). On the other hand, civic leaders argued that the complaints lodged in

the app were not addressed promptly, most people did not even know about it, and that

the Corporation did not effectively maintain public toilets and improve waste collection

to warrant a higher ranking (Ramkumar 2019; Madhavan 2019).

One reason for the agency’s inability to expand service provision is the

administrative silos between the City Health Officer and the City Engineer discussed in

Chapter 3 that hinder the procurement of necessary equipment (Madhavan 2019). NGO

Leaders A and B and officials at the Coimbatore Corporation also pointed to the role of

political interference in limiting the agency’s activities. Comparing themselves to Trichy,

which has been consistently ranked the cleanest city in the state in the rankings, they

declared that the lack of political interference with the Trichy Corporation has allowed it

the autonomy to fully implement the Swachh Survekshan indicators and gain the most

marks. In contrast, they asserted that in solid waste, the agency in Coimbatore has been

forced to operate with half the number of trucks and workers it needs because the

Commissioner’s decisions are subject to Mr. Velumani’s approval.102 While Coimbatore

has the resources and bureaucratic will to invest in hiring additional sanitation workers

and waste collection and segregation vehicles for SBM, it is unable to do so because it is

not in the personal and financial interests of the politician and his cronies. Gupta (2017)

102 Interview with NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with NGO Leader B. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018. Interview with CCMC officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018.

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presents a typology of corruption in contemporary India in four major sectors: land,

infrastructure construction, sale of public assets, and welfare and defense programs. He

argues that in the case of infrastructure development, construction projects like roads,

airports, and stadiums are more susceptible to rent extraction because of kickbacks that

can be collected during the bidding process and the political act of land acquisition (Gupta

2017). Sanitation interventions like hiring more workers and buying garbage trucks, while

open to being an avenue for corruption, may be less profitable compared to construction

ventures.

Perhaps coincidentally, the Madras High Court is currently investigating Mr.

Velumani for corruption on the basis of petitions filed by the Organizing Secretary of the

DMK, the opposition party in the state, and Arappor Iyakkam, an NGO (Imranullah

2019). He has been accused of awarding 349 civil contracts to firms run by his friends and

family through his influence over municipal corporations from 2014 to 2018 (Imranullah

2019; Sureshkumar 2019; Lobo 2018). NGO Leaders A and B and Coimbatore

Corporation officials claimed that the penalty for going against Mr. Velumani’s wishes in

the agency would result in the reassignment of senior bureaucrats to less prestigious

positions, dampening their career trajectories within the civil service. This is consistent

with Iyer and Mani’s (2007; 2012) insight that Indian politicians often use transfers as a

tool to exert control over bureaucrats, effectively calcifying bureaucracies’ independent

decision-making power.

In response to political meddling in the Corporation, the network of environmental

sanitation NGOs has become more prominent in sanitation interventions in Coimbatore,

empowered by SBM’s national and local campaigns and supported by senior Corporation

bureaucrats. These organizations are part of a vast group of NGOs in the area that focus

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on various urban environmental justice issues spanning food justice and road

improvements to cleaning up lakes and expanding urban forests, with an emphasis on

entrepreneurship and start-ups, reinforcing Coimbatore’s identity as a business-forward

city.103 Some of the prominent NGOs in environmental sanitation are the Residents

Awareness Association of Coimbatore (RAAC), No Dumping, and Toilet First. RAAC has

been a driving force in helping the Corporation implement SBM, and has partnered with

sanitary inspectors and workers to organize mass cleaning activities in busy locations in

Coimbatore, like the Coimbatore Junction Railway Station and the Ukkadam bus stand

(RAAC website). The organization has also conducted awareness campaigns to increase

residents’ knowledge of the Swachhata app with mass app downloading events and

workshops and SBM e-learning awareness held in schools and colleges (RAAC

website).104

Besides leading interventions, RAAC, more specifically, Mr. R. Raveendran, the

Honorary Secretary of the organization, serves as an informal liaison between the

Corporation and the Coimbatore NGO network to design and implement sanitation

interventions with the assistance of the Corporation (Srinivasan 2013).105 I met Mr.

Raveendran in his office at Cardwell Manufacturing, a firm that makes fabric processing

machines. During our interview, he described how the NGOs in the city are close-knit and

support one another by sharing resources, expertise, and volunteers. He said that there

were no ego problems between NGO leaders in Coimbatore, and that they recognize the

103 Interview with Ms. Vijayalakshmi Murali. Coimbatore, Jul 16, 2018; Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with Ms. Timple Luloo. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018; Interview with Mr. Rajesh Subburaj. Coimbatore, Dec 10, 2018; Interview with Ms. Anusha Ananthakrishnan. Coimbatore, Dec 12, 2018. 104 Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018. 105 Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018.

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value of collective action. This sentiment was also echoed by Ms. Vijayalakshmi Murali

and Ms. Timple Luloo, fellow environmental leaders.106 RAAC functions similarly to a

business incubator. People interested in working in the environmental sector in

Coimbatore approach RAAC or Mr. Raveendran, who advises them on how to develop

their NGO or start-up and how to work with the Corporation. These nascent organizations

are then mentored by RAAC for one year, which provides them with resources like

meeting spaces and access to funds. After a year, the new NGOs are usually on firmer

footing and join the NGO network.

One such NGO is No Dumping, a waste management organization specializing in

waste segregation and processing. Mr. Prashanth and Mr. Saran Raj established the NGO

with Mr. Raveendran’s help, which now serves 43 residential communities, 4200 houses,

and the Coimbatore Airport (No Dumping website). It collects 5 tons of segregated waste

a day, processes it, and sells inorganic, combustible, and non-recyclable waste to ACC

Cement as an alternative source of fuel (No Dumping website).107 No Dumping also

conducts behavioral change workshops in solid waste management.108 I met Mr.

Prashanth in the Advanced Solid and Liquid Resource Management (ASLRM) Shed

outside of Coimbatore, where he is working with a Town Panchayat to improve its door-

to-door waste collection, segregation, and processing capacity. He showed me around the

Shed and explained the different technologies No Dumping is employing to bring

sustainable waste management to the area, like vermicomposting and efficient, scalable

processes to turn organic waste into biogas. I asked Mr. Prashanth how SBM had

106 Interview with Ms. Vijayalakshmi Murali. Coimbatore, Jul 16, 2018; Interview with Ms. Timple Luloo. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018. 107 Interview with Mr. Prashanth. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018. 108 Interview with Ms. Roopa Prasanth. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018.

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impacted his work, and his answer was surprising. He declared that the extensive news

coverage on SBM and the attendant sanitation “revolution” had convinced him to enter

the waste entrepreneurship sector when he graduated from college in 2016. Along with

NGO Leaders C and D who are waste management experts and familiar with No

Dumping’s efforts, Mr. Prashanth asserted that celebrities’ and national politicians’

interest in SBM and the publicity generated by city rankings had energized the solid waste

management sector in the city, and had made households more receptive to behavioral

change campaigns targeting waste segregation.109 Without SBM as a catalyst, they felt that

No Dumping would neither have existed nor grown.

Mr. Prashanth also acknowledged the support of the former Commissioner of the

Coimbatore Corporation, Dr. K. Vijayakarthikeyan, for legitimizing the work of the NGO

and sharing the agency’s resources with the organization.110 No Dumping, for instance,

uses the Corporation’s composting facilities for its organic waste. All the NGO leaders I

spoke with in Coimbatore extolled Dr. Vijayakarthikeyan, declaring him “a friend to the

NGOs,” without any prompting from me about their relationships with the Corporation.111

NGO Leaders A and B and Mr. Rajesh Subburaj from the Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation

Support Program explained that as a trained medical doctor, the former Commissioner

had a keen interest in implementing public health interventions in the city, which was

109 Interview with Mr. Prashanth. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018; Interviews with NGO Leaders C and D. Coimbatore, Aug 23, 2018. 110 There were two periods of bureaucratic reassignments in 2019 in the state that moved around senior bureaucrats. The current Commissioner of CCMC is Mr. J. Sravan Kumar, who assumed this post in Feb 2019, taking over from Dr. K. Vijayakarthikeyan. 111 Interview with Ms. Vijayalakshmi Murali. Coimbatore, Jul 16, 2018; Phone interview with Mr. Selvaraj. Chennai, Aug 16, 2018; Interview with Mr. Prashanth. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018; Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with Ms. Roopa Prasanth. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with Ms. Timple Luloo. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018; Interview with NGO Leader B. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018; Interview with NGO Leaders C and D. Coimbatore, Aug 23, 2018; Interview with Mr. Roosevelt. Coimbatore, Aug 24, 2018.

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galvanized by SBM’s emphasis on environmental sanitation.112 They also noted that since

the Coimbatore Corporation’s autonomy was constrained by Mr. Velumani, the former

Commissioner and other senior bureaucrats were active in championing the efforts of

NGOs’ in improving sanitation. For example, senior bureaucrats often attend behavioral

change campaigns held by NGOs and events to clean up litter in various parts of the city,

joining in the clean-up efforts with residents.113

In toilet construction, Dr. Vijayakarthikeyan led the establishment of Toilet First,

a non-profit backed by the Corporation and NGO leaders aimed at crowdfunding toilets

for poor households in the city in 2016 (Toilet First Facebook page; Sivaswamy 2016).

NGO Leader A explained that the Commissioner tried to circumvent politics at the agency

by giving it to entrepreneurs instead of contractors.114 SBM’s philosophy of sanitation as

a shared responsibility is operationalized in the structure for financing toilets; the central

government contributes Rs. 4,000 for each individual household toilet, state

governments pay a minimum of Rs. 2,667, and the rest of the funds are supposed to come

from ULBs, beneficiaries, private sector participation, and CSR funds (SBM Guidelines

2017). The general estimate given by NGO Leader A and Sanitation Consultant A for the

total cost of constructing a household toilet in Coimbatore is between Rs. 18,000 and Rs.

20,000, making toilets a significant investment even with SBM subsidies.115 To address

this, Toilet First requested funding from corporations and community organizations to

construct toilets for low income households in true SBM fashion - an attractive logo,

112 Interview with NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with NGO Leader B. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018; Interview with Mr. Rajesh Subburaj. Coimbatore, Dec 10, 2018. 113 Interview with Mr. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with NGO Leader B. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018. 114 Interview with NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018. 115 Interview with NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with Sanitation Consultant A. Coimbatore, Aug 23, 2018.

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extensive social media outreach, a Toilet First app, and a pithy motto (“Let’s Fund

Together, Build Together, Unite Together) (Sivaswamy 2016). The organization then

rallied civil engineering students from the numerous universities in Coimbatore and

framed its construct-a-thons as a way to gain hands-on building skills.116 Besides,

constructing almost 2,500 household toilets in the city, the nonprofit also provided

behavioral change education for users (Toilet First Facebook page).

Toilet First is an example of how senior bureaucrats at the Coimbatore Corporation

manage to circumvent political meddling and support NGOs. Political interference in the

agency has also created embedded NGOs in Coimbatore - NGOs with strong ties to the

bureaucracy, community, and business. The embedded NGO is a twist on Peter Evans’s

(1995) concept of embedded autonomy, which describes “a concrete set of connections”

between a developmental state and significant social groups which share a similar vision

for societal transformation (p. 59). In Coimbatore, however, the embedded autonomy

does not refer to the state - in this case the hobbled agency - but to the NGO network

empowered by senior bureaucrats and its professional business ties. NGO leaders in

Coimbatore, unlike in Trichy, largely own their own businesses in Coimbatore’s major

industries, in addition to being activists. For example, Mr. Raveendran is Managing

Director of Cardwell Manufacturing, Ms. Luloo runs her own ayurvedic practice, and Ms.

Murali and her family own a jewelry business (Dubey 2015).117 Ms. Vanitha Mohan, Vice

President of RAAC and co-founder of Siruthuli, a water resource management NGO, is

the Chairman of Pricol Limited. Pricol is a large, Coimbatore-based automotive parts

116 Interview with Sanitation Consultant A. Coimbatore, Aug 23, 2018. 117 Interview with Ms. Vijayalakshmi Murali. Coimbatore, Jul 16, 2018; Interview with Mr. Prashanth. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018; Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with Ms. Timple Luloo. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018.

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manufacturer, and Ms. Mohan also heads their CSR division (WEF 2014). Mr. Prashanth

straddles both the business and NGO side of things in No Dumping in his capacity as a

self-described waste entrepreneur, reflecting the entrepreneurial bent of the city. This is

reminiscent of Connors (2007)’s findings that “elite NGOs,” or NGOs founded by

professionals and scholars, are at the forefront of bottom-up societal change. In contrast,

the leaders of Gramalaya and Scope, the two NGOs in Trichy, are experts in water,

sanitation, hygiene, and rural development.118 The Coimbatore NGOs’ embeddedness in

the business community enables them to fund their sanitation projects by leveraging CSR

sponsorship, and not having to rely on the Corporation for capital. This is particularly

helpful in SBM implementation that relies on private sector participation to complement

funds from the central and state governments (SBM Guidelines 2017).

In comparison to Chennai and Trichy, Coimbatore was the only city in which NGO

leaders generously offered to connect me with officials at the Corporation for my study.

Mr. Raveendran, Ms. Luloo, and Ms. Murali all had relationships with bureaucrats at

different levels, from their ward supervisors to the Commissioner at the agency’s

headquarters. They have developed these connections based on their NGOs’ work, and

they reach out to the Corporation as needed to smooth the path for their efforts, like

obtaining permits to hold events or requesting the relevant officials’ approval in using the

agency’s resources, like the compost yard in the case of No Dumping.119 In concert with

the senior bureaucrats’ support of their work, NGOs in Coimbatore have intimate

118 Interview with Mr. Sai Damodaran. Trichy, Sep 5, 2018; Interview with Mr. Subburaman. Trichy, May 29, 2019. 119 Interview with Ms. Vijayalakshmi Murali. Coimbatore, Jul 16, 2018; Interview with Mr. Prashanth. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018; Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with Ms. Timple Luloo. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018.

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knowledge of how the agency functions and how to work with the agency in implementing

sanitation interventions.

Besides having strong relationships with the private sector and the bureaucracy,

the NGOs are also well-connected with community groups and the press. RAAC, for

example, is based on a residents’ association formed by people living in certain parts of

Coimbatore, like Bharathi Colony, L.B. Colony, and Shringar Nagar (RAAC website). No

Dumping started providing solid waste management services in the city when Ms. Roopa

Prasanth approached them on behalf of her apartment complex, Sunny Side Apartments,

to improve the community’s waste segregation, collection, and disposal efforts after

reading about their work in the newspaper (No Dumping website).120 Ms. Prasanth later

worked with No Dumping as a behavioral change communication expert, conducting

awareness campaigns for domestic helpers and implementing household waste audits to

evaluate their progress.121 In addition to these ties to social groups, Mr. Raveendran also

noted that RAAC works closely with the press to highlight the NGOs’ work in sanitation

in Coimbatore and to attract more investments and volunteers from the publicity.122

While Mr. Velumani’s “political influence” haunts the Coimbatore Corporation, the NGOs

are at the forefront of environmental sanitation in the city, solidly backed by business,

bureaucrats, and residents.

4.3 Toilet v. Trash: Relevance of NGO Expertise in Coimbatore and Trichy

In agency-NGO coordination, the type of expertise the NGO can provide to the

bureaucracy matters. In the case of the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in Karachi, the NGO

120 Interview with Ms. Roopa Prasanth. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018. 121 Interview with Ms. Roopa Prasanth. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018. 122 Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018.

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extensively documented sewer lines in the city’s informal settlements using statistics and

maps, granular information government agencies and foreign consultants did not possess

(Hasan 2006). The OPP’s work complemented the mandate of the Karachi Water and

Sewerage Board and the Sindh Katchi Abadi Authority (agency in charge of informal

settlements), and increased its credibility with city, provincial, and national agencies in

water and sanitation delivery in Pakistan (Hasan 2006). In Coimbatore and Trichy, the

relevance of the NGOs’ expertise to the agencies’ SBM priorities impact coordination.

In Coimbatore, the NGO network focuses on both toilet construction and solid

waste management with an emphasis on the latter, as evidenced by the discussion above

on RAAC, No Dumping, and Toilet First. In addition, the Shunya Project was launched

before SBM in 2013 as a pilot to implement zero waste solutions in the city. The

Corporation has invested Rs. 100 crore (USD 13.9 million) in this initiative, with an

additional Rs. 85 lakhs (USD 118,000) contributed by AIFORIA, an international agency

for sustainability based in the European Union (Madhavan 2013). ICLEI, an international

organization dedicated to sustainable development in local government, is helping in

implementation. This project aimed to make Ward 23 in Coimbatore a bin-free area;

households were encouraged to segregate their waste and sanitation workers at the

Corporation were instructed to provided regular door-to-door collection of waste.123 In

addition to SBM, the co-founders of No Dumping were also inspired by the Shunya

Project to pursue careers in waste processing and entrepreneurship (No Dumping

website). The Shunya Project was declared a success by the Corporation, and a similar

123 Interview with Mr. Roosevelt. Coimbatore, Aug 24, 2018.

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effort was implemented in adjoining Wards 22 and 24 in 2017 - this time, funded by the

Swiss Embassy and ICLEI (Times of India 2017).

During my fieldwork from 2017 to 2019, all three Corporations were privileging

interventions in solid waste management over toilet construction under SBM. This was

initially a surprise to me because the earlier critiques of the policy before I started

fieldwork alleged the opposite - that while SBM intended to improve environmental

sanitation, its chief operational concern was the frenzied construction of toilets across

India (Kumar 2015; Business Standard 2018; Alexander & Padmanabhan 2019). In

Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy, while the Corporations were building household

latrines and community and public toilets as dictated by the Swachh Survekshan

indicators, they were more enthusiastically pursuing solid waste management. The

Greater Chennai Corporation was in the middle of revising the 2016 solid waste

management guidelines in response to SBM to better articulate responsibilities of

stakeholders like bulk generators in improving waste collection and disposal in the city.124

Trichy and Coimbatore were attempting to implement 100% door-to-door waste

collection, and Trichy was focusing on acquiring enough equipment like pushcarts and

trucks to build its solid waste management capacity.125 Trichy officials also emphasized

the importance of addressing the pollution and health hazards the Ariyamangalam dump

yard poses to nearby residents.126

In Coimbatore, the NGOs’ general interest in solid waste management, particularly

waste entrepreneurship, dovetails with the agency’s priorities in SBM. Besides the

124 Interview with Assistant Executive Engineer, Greater Chennai Corporation. Chennai, Dec 21, 2018. 125 Interview with Trichy City Corporation officials. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018; Interview with Coimbatore City Municipal Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018. 126 Interview with Trichy City Corporation officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019.

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political meddling in the bureaucracy that has resulted in embedded NGOs, the

organizations’ expertise in solid waste complements the agency’s agenda. However, the

situation in Trichy is the opposite. Gramalaya and Scope both focus on water, sanitation,

and hygiene interventions, and do not focus on solid waste management. Therefore, while

their pre-SBM efforts were lauded by mid-level bureaucrats at the Trichy Corporation for

improving access to community and public toilets especially in slums, senior bureaucrats

prefer coordinating with RWAs for SBM. I interviewed Mr. Ravichandran, the

Commissioner of the Trichy Corporation, about his agency’s relationships with NGOs.127

He emphasized the Corporation’s innovative ways of using social media, media, and

competitions to elicit public interest in SBM’s goals and in Swachh Survekshan, such as

the jingle contest on sanitation the agency organized. He also listed the improvements in

solid waste management the agency had undertaken, like updating equipment and

expanding door-to-door service provision. When I asked him about the importance of

NGOs to Trichy’s success in the Swachh Survekshan rankings, he explicitly said that the

agency’s relationships with RWAs were more important under SBM. Given the

Corporation’s solid waste management priorities, it makes sense that coordination with

RWAs is privileged. On the Commissioner’s Twitter account, for example, there are

several posts documenting his attendance at various plogging events held by RWAs in the

city. A Scandinavian fitness trend I learned of in central Tamil Nadu, plogging refers to

the activity of picking up trash while running. The Trichy Commissioner observed this

trend on social media and implemented it as part of the city’s SBM efforts.128 Thus, in

Trichy the expertise of Gramalaya and Scope were not seen as directly relevant to the

127 Interview with Mr. N. Ravichandran, Commissioner of Trichy City Corporation. Trichy, May 29, 2019. 128 Interview with Trichy City Corporation officials. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018.

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Corporation’s solid waste management priorities under SBM, in comparison to RWAs,

which are key actors in the city’s quest to be garbage-free and bin-free.

4.4 Civic Participation and Coordination: Public-Private Partnerships, City Identity, and Public Representatives In their empirical studies of NGO-agency relationships in the Indian and Pakistani

water and sanitation sector, Connors (2005, 2007), Das (2015), and Hasan (2006) found

that civic participation, or the degree of citizen engagement in democratic mechanisms

that keep the public sector accountable, functions as a source of checks and balances to

agencies. Across the three cities, three facets of civic participation emerged in agency-

NGO coordination: the championing of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Tamil Nadu

over NGOs in sanitation, city identity and environmental activism, and the capacity for

public representatives to mediate between agencies and the public.

Public-Private Partnerships v. NGOs: The Rise and Fall of Exnora in Chennai

SBM did not introduce Chennai to the importance of solid waste management. In

1989, Mr. M.B. Nirmal started Civic Exnora, an NGO that emphasized source segregation

in households and composting organic waste to address the city’s mounting garbage

problems (Sridhar 2013). By the 1990s, it had emerged as one of the biggest

environmental movements in India, with over 3,000 branches across the country

(Shekhar 1996). In Exnora, Mr. Nirmal emphasized the importance of community

ownership of streets, and implemented door-to-door collection of waste with a household

user fee in many areas around Chennai, cutting across income and class divisions (Sridhar

2013; Shekhar 1996). A “street beautifier” on a modified pushcart regularly collected trash

on participating streets, and deposited them at the Corporation’s designated transfer

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station (Sridhar 2013). The organization also relied on volunteers, and attracted the

attention and involvement of several celebrities in the city like movie director Mani

Ratnam and actress Suhasini (Shekhar 1996). Mr. Nirmal underscored the importance of

coordination with the Chennai Corporation, noting that Exnora was “not [a rival] of civic

authorities. [Their] efforts [were] microcosmic because [they] still need the Corporation

to haul the tons of garbage and build roads” (Mr. Nirmal in Shekhar 1996). While the

Corporation did not always share this collegiate sentiment and often viewed Exnora as a

trespasser on their turf, Mr. Nirmal’s diplomacy and acknowledgement of the agency’s

previous efforts in supporting the NGO defused tensions between the two (Shekhar 1996).

By 1996-1997, the organization was collecting 20 percent of the 3,000 tons of solid waste

the city was generating and encouraging source segregation and zero waste behavior in

households (Akshatha 2017; Shekhar 1996; Sridhar 2013).

However, as Sridhar (2013) notes, Exnora was a revolution in solid waste in

Chennai that almost happened. In 2000, the Chennai Corporation hired CES Onyx, a

private contractor as a service provider in some parts of the city (Sridhar 2013; Akshatha

2017). While Exnora was ready to work with Onyx, Mr. Nirmal realized that their

“ideologies” were very different (Sridhar 2013). Onyx mixed segregated waste during

collection and did not charge user fees, leading to a decline in the level of interest

residents felt about waste segregation and ownership of their streets (Sridhar 2013;

Akshatha 2017). Exnora’s influence in Chennai and across India dimmed, and the NGO

is no longer a major service provider. However, Mr. Nirmal’s expertise has been useful in

the revived interest in solid waste management in Tamil Nadu since the mid-2010s. The

co-founders of No Dumping, for instance, trained with Mr. Nirmal before launching their

organization (No Dumping website).

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This turn towards private contractors around 2000 impacted the role of NGOs as

service providers in both solid waste management and toilet construction in Chennai. In

my interview with Sulabh International, a prominent national sanitation NGO in India

that focuses on sanitation and human rights, its officials in Chennai said that they were

no longer active participants in the city’s sanitation efforts.129 About thirty to forty years

ago, Sulabh assisted the Corporation in building a few hundred public toilets and was in

charge of operation and maintenance until the 2000s, when the agency switched to

private contractors. Currently, they are focusing their efforts on constructing toilets and

implementing behavioral change programs on sanitation and hygiene in schools outside

of Chennai.

In Chennai, the current absence of major NGOs in environmental sanitation

provision can be partly attributed to the privileging of the private sector over NGOs in

sanitation infrastructure in Tamil Nadu since the 2000s. As the capital city and the seat

of state bureaucrats and politicians, the valorization of private sector participation is

particularly tenacious in Chennai. Senior Bureaucrat B who is familiar with infrastructure

development in the state questioned the incentives of NGOs to remain committed to

sanitation provision, compared to the private sector that is driven by financial profit.130

The bureaucrat declared that monetary incentives would encourage improvements in

service quality and was confused about what motivates sanitation NGOs to be efficient

service providers. Similarly, NGOs have also turned to the private sector for support in

Tamil Nadu. Mr. Damodaran noted that corporate sponsors approach Gramalaya to fund

their programs.131 The behavioral change workshop I attended for school teachers, for

129 Interview with Sulabh International officials. Chennai, Dec 4, 2018. 130 Interview with Senior Bureaucrat B. Chennai, Dec 6, 2018. 131 Interview with Mr. Sai Damodaran. Trichy, Sep 5, 2018.

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instance, was sponsored by Merrill Lynch (Figure 12). Officials at the Trichy Corporation

also mentioned that the prizes given out for their various SBM-related competitions held

in schools were funded by local businesses.132 Thus, the allure of the private sector has

animated both the public sector and NGOs.

Figure 12: School Teachers’ Training on Washman. Conducted by Gramalaya and co-sponsored by Merrill Lynch. Suvai Meeting Hall, Trichy, Sep 6, 2018

City Identity and Sanitation Activism

“You are nobody in Chennai.”133 Senior Bureaucrat B, who is familiar with

infrastructure implementation across different Tamil Nadu cities, declared that given the

city’s large size and demographic profile there is no coherent city identity or sense of

belonging. He described how people in Chennai come from all over India and the world

to make money, and feel no ownership over their space because many view it as a transient

place. Comprising migrants from Northeastern India looking for jobs to Korean expats

132 Interview with Trichy City Corporation officials. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018. 133 Interview with Senior Bureaucrat B. Chennai, Dec 6, 2018.

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who work for Hyundai, Chennai’s population is both socioeconomically and ethnically

diverse compared to Coimbatore and Trichy. This demographic mixture and lack of place-

based ownership makes it difficult for residents to organize around common social goals,

unlike the SHGs in Trichy’s slums. Here, SBM’s public communication efforts have made

little impact on addressing the need for a coherent city identity to encourage the

grassroots revolution the policy envisions. While officials at the Chennai Corporation

reported a little more interest in solid waste management activities from existing

community groups, SBM has not prompted the creation of sanitation NGOs or

community groups representing a broad coalition of residents to advocate for better

environmental sanitation provision in the city.134

The link between city identity and civic participation in sanitation efforts was

reinforced most strongly in Coimbatore by NGO leaders. Mr. Prashanth, Mr. Raveendran,

Ms. Prasanth, Ms. Murali, Ms. Timple declared that one of the primary reasons for the

city’s relative success in SBM’s rankings compared to Chennai and Trichy is the history of

environmental activism in Coimbatore that is rooted in feelings of ownership and civic

pride.135 When I asked Ms. Murali why there were so many environmental activists in

Coimbatore compared to Chennai or even Trichy, she looked at me fairly blankly and

stated simply, “This is our city. We care about it.”136 Mr. Raveendran expanded on this

point, noting that unlike people living in Chennai, Coimbatore residents have lived in the

city for generations and are proud of its environmental and economic resources.137

134 Interview with SBM team. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with Dr. Srinivasan. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018. 135 Interview with Ms. Vijayalakshmi Murali. Coimbatore, Jul 16, 2018; Interview with Mr. Prashanth. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018; Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with Ms. Roopa Prasanth. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018. Interview with Ms. Timple Luloo. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018. 136 Interview with Ms. Vijayalakshmi Murali. Coimbatore, Jul 16, 2018. 137 Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018.

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NGO leaders and Coimbatore Corporation officials traced the roots of the current

activism in sanitation to the founding of Siruthuli in 2003, an NGO that was started by

Coimbatore-based corporations to address the area’s severe drought (Siruthuli website).

The Bannari Amman Group of Companies, Pricol Ltd., LMW Group of Companies, ELGI

Group of Companies, and Sri Sankara Eye Society banded together to tackle the city’s

water issues (Siruthuli website). These companies represent the major industries in

Coimbatore - automotive parts, textiles, and medical tourism - and are homegrown,

indicating their close ties to the city. Siruthuli was successful in rejuvenating the Noyyal

River to help ameliorate drought conditions in the district, and has continued its work in

water resource management and raising awareness around afforestation and waste

management.138 Mr. Raveendran, who volunteered with Siruthuli before RAAC,

emphasized that the NGO inspired a cascade of environmental activism in the region

around water, sanitation, food, and forests.139 In addition to a coherent city identity, he

stated that the city’s NGO network is fueled by two main groups in the city who are

interested in volunteering for environmental causes - students at Coimbatore’s numerous

colleges and universities and professionals in the many IT companies in the area. Mr.

Raveendran noted that in comparison to Trichy which has fewer educational institutions,

Coimbatore’s environmental sector is supported by college students. This is evident from

Toilet First, which leveraged the skills of civil engineering students to build low-cost

toilets. Mr. Raveendran and Ms. Prasanth also ascribe the relative ease of implementation

of SBM’s behavioral change interventions in the city to its history of activism since

138 Interview with Ms. Anusha Ananthakrishnan. Coimbatore, Dec 12, 2018. 139 Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018.

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residents have become conditioned to participating in various environmental campaigns

for more than a decade and are therefore more receptive to SBM’s messaging.140

Trichy, too, experienced a pre-SBM sanitation revolution in the 2000s, but for

different reasons. Mr. Subburaman from Scope, one of the prominent sanitation NGOs in

the city, and Mr. Damodaran from Gramalaya outlined how toilet production became a

focus of the Trichy Corporation, complemented by the NGOs’ initiatives.141 In the 2000s,

the Collector, Corporation Commissioner, and Police Commissioner were collective policy

champions for expanded access to toilets. In concert with the international NGO Water

Aid, the local NGOs and senior bureaucrats worked together to build community toilets

and public toilets in the city. At the time, parts of Trichy were classified as rural by the

state, which allowed the NGOs to apply for funds from the state government’s self-

sufficiency scheme to construct toilets. The Rural Development and Panchayat Raj

Department in the Government of Tamil Nadu has been implementing this scheme to

encourage public participation in government projects, and to encourage coordination

between community groups and rural agencies (TNRD). Mr. Subburaman noted that in

the 2000s, while toilet production and access were being promoted, solid waste

management did not receive the same attention. Senior bureaucrats were less interested

in it, perhaps because of the specialized expertise of Gramalaya and Scope, and no

guidelines existed at the local level to address the city’s trash problems. Under SBM, he

stated that the tables have turned in favor of solid waste management. In both Trichy and

140 Interview with Mr. R. Raveendran. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with Ms. Roopa Prasanth. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018. 141 Interview with Mr. Sai Damodaran. Trichy, Sep 5, 2018; Interview with Mr. M. Subburaman. Trichy, May 29, 2019.

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Coimbatore, SBM has helped catalyze existing efforts in sanitation that have built on

environmental activism and policy champions in the bureaucracy.

Public Representatives: Help or Hindrance?

Tamil Nadu has not had local elections since 2016, leaving cities and villages

without elected representatives and mayors.142 There are several reasons given for this,

ranging from administrative ones regarding the delimitation of local bodies to political

explanations of the DMK’s and AIADMK’s desire to schedule elections at an opportune

time for them (Ramakrishnan 2019). During the period of my study from 2017 to 2019,

there were thus no elected representatives. However, many of the interview participants

discussed the importance of ward councilors and mayors in sanitation implementation,

drawing on previous experiences. Across the three cities, the impact of public

representatives on sanitation is mixed.

Senior Bureaucrats A and B both asked me the same rhetorical question: Who

holds the power in implementation - bureaucrats or politicians?143 They asserted that in

contrast to popular perception, bureaucrats serve at the pleasure of elected officials in

Tamil Nadu, giving them the authority to influence implementation trajectories. When

public representatives use this power for good, they can serve as a bridge between the

service provider (agency or NGO) and the public, and can monitor agencies to keep them

accountable. In the Shunya Project in Coimbatore, Mr. Roosevelt, the Project

Coordinator, highlighted how the ward councilor worked together with the ward

supervisor from the Corporation and ICLEI officers to communicate information on

142 At the time of writing this dissertation, the state has announced local elections to be held in rural areas at the end of December 2019, leaving cities without a definite timeline. 143 Interview with Senior Bureaucrat A. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Interview with Senior Bureaucrat B. Chennai, Dec 6, 2018.

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waste segregation to households and commercial establishments.144 The councilor also

authorized the Corporation to disconnect the water supply in households that failed to

comply after repeated warnings to encourage cooperation. Mr. Roosevelt asserted that

without the support of this public representative, it would have been difficult to create

sustainable behavioral change in the community around waste segregation. Mr.

Prashanth had a similar story about the Town Panchayat where he currently works. The

local official, Dr. D. Ravi, ran for elections on a solid-waste-management-focused

platform to address the area’s trash problems and to elevate the status of sanitation

among residents.145 In an effort to signal to the community that living next to solid waste

management facilities is not a social stigma, he directed the authorities to build a landfill

near his house and invested some of his money in it to demonstrate his commitment. Mr.

Prashanth credits him for smoothing the path for No Dumping to implement its solid

waste management model in the area.

However, public representatives may also be corrupt. NGO Leader B reported her

experience dealing with various ward councilors in Coimbatore.146 When she realized that

the councilors were more interested in politics and bribes than serving their constituents,

she started circumventing them to approach the Corporation directly for assistance in

infrastructure improvements in her neighborhood or her work in lake restoration. When

one of the councilors realized that he had no hold over her, he told her neighbors at a

public meeting to warn her to “watch out. She’s a woman living alone.”147 NGO Leader B

144 Interview with Mr. Roosevelt. Coimbatore, Aug 24, 2018. 145 Interview with Mr. Prashanth. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018. 146 Interview with NGO Leader B. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018. 147 Ibid

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stressed that it was difficult, from her experience, to generalize about the impact elected

officials have on sanitation since it is dependent on the individual.

When not threatening environmental activists and receiving bribes, elected

representatives can serve as a form of checks and balance to public agencies in the state,

similar to Connors (2007) description of how Bangalore’s NGOs issued report cards on

the performance of bureaucracies to keep them accountable. Dr. Karen Coelho from the

Madras Institute of Development Studies, Ms. Reeba Devaraj and Dr. Suneethi Sundar

from the Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Program, and Mr. Roosevelt emphasized

that bureaucrats at the Corporation need to be monitored by ward councilors and the

mayor to maintain or improve service provision in sanitation.148 Ms. Santha Sheela Nair,

a retired bureaucrat who previously served at the Municipal Administration and Water

Supply, also underscored local elections as a cornerstone of civic participation in public

affairs (Ramakrishnan 2019). Ramakrishnan (2019) directly connects the lack of elected

officials to Tamil Nadu’s performance in SBM since 2016. Drawing on interviews with

bureaucrats across the state, he posits that Trichy’s declining rank in Swachh Survekshan

from 3rd in 2016 to 6th in 2017, 13th in 2018, and 39th in 2019 is associated with the absence

of public representatives, hampering improvements in sanitation (Ramakrishnan 2019;

Jaisankar 2019). Here, SBM’s rankings, campaigns, and app have little bearing on public

participation that is necessary for the revolution the policy envisions since the primary

mechanism for civic participation does not currently exist.

148 Interview with Ms. Reeba Devaraj and Dr. Suneethi Sundar. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019; Interview with Dr. Karen Coelho. Chennai, Jul 6, 2019.

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4.5 Concluding Remarks

Political interference at the Coimbatore Corporation has created a unique situation

in the city where senior bureaucrats, constrained by the State Minister for Municipal

Administration, have been championing NGO efforts in rolling out SBM. These NGOs

pointed to the effectiveness of the policy’s energetic media and social media campaigns,

emphasizing how demand for their services has increased in the city after the introduction

of SBM. The difference between toilet construction and usage and solid waste

management prominently emerges in this examination of agency-NGO coordination. In

Coimbatore, most of the NGOs were focused on solid waste management, which matched

the agency’s priorities. However, in Trichy, Gramalaya’s and Scope’s expertise is in toilet

construction and usage, which did not match the municipal corporation’s agenda under

SBM.

Historical context was particularly important in tracing the trajectories of agency-

NGO coordination across the three cities. City identity, a history of environmental

activism, matching between NGO expertise and agency priorities, and the turn toward

PPPs in the 2000s all explain how and why agency-NGO coordination in Chennai,

Coimbatore, and Trichy have changed across time. While SBM’s campaigns have

catalyzed the efforts of embedded NGOs in Coimbatore, they have not been able to

address deeply rooted institutional constraints in the three cities like the loss of autonomy

in the Coimbatore Corporation or the effacement of mechanisms for civic participation

across the state. Similar to Exnora, SBM is a revolution that almost happened (Sridhar

2013).

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5| DOES A RISING TIDE LIFT ALL BOATS? SBM AND

ORGANIZATIONAL REPUTATION

5.1 SBM and Organizational Reputation

Agencies involved in sanitation provision in the Global South have a double-

reputation problem, particularly in India; bureaucracies are viewed as corrupt and

ineffective, and sanitation is intertwined with class and caste (EPW 2019; Vishwanathan

2012; Coffey et al. 2014; Doron & Jeffrey 2018). In my study, I examined how SBM, a

policy that combined aggressive marketing strategies, rankings, and rewards, impacted

inter-agency and agency-NGO coordination in urban sanitation in Tamil Nadu. The

existing literature on coordination describes the importance of bureaucratic capacity,

administrative coherence, bureaucratic autonomy, relevance of NGO expertise, and civic

participation (Bach & Wegrich 2018; Pritchett et al. 2010; Andrews et al. 2017; Chibber

2002; Iyer and Mani 2007; Connors 2005; Connors 2007; Pervaiz et al. 2008). I

connected these factors with the literature on organizational reputation to examine what

drove coordination and if SBM’s reputational devices had any effect on it.

The case of SBM in Tamil Nadu illustrates how reputational tools are no match for

existing institutional weaknesses, like weak bureaucratic capacity, administrative

incoherence, and political interference. In some cases, the use of these reputational tools

can intensify existing institutional features, like increasing the burden of documentation

in overloaded agencies. The case thus provides empirical evidence for Maor’s (2015)

observations on the potential limits of organizational reputational theories in public

administration to explain agency behavior. Examining coordination in Chennai,

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Coimbatore, and Trichy also sheds light on the importance of tracing historical context in

understanding agency-NGO coordination. Across the three cities, city identity, a history

of environmental activism, previous partnerships, and agency preference for private

sector partners in urban development projects illuminate why NGOs and bureaucracies

work together in urban sanitation provision or not.

Inter-Agency Coordination and State Ownership of National Policies

I found that in the three cities coordination here is primarily a function of weak

bureaucratic capacity and administrative coherence, reinforcing Pritchett et al.’s (2010)

and Chibber’s (2002) insights. SBM’s reputational tools have no impact on incentivizing

coordination. Bureaucrats tasked with implementing SBM at the three municipal

corporations are also overseeing their city’s existing solid waste management and health

needs. Coordination with other agencies, like Metro Water in the case of Chennai, does

not fall within their direct purview, recalling Bach & Wegrich’s (2018) assertion that

coordination is external to an agency’s priorities that focus on fulfilling its core mandate.

The lack of coordination between the Chennai Corporation and Metro Water also reflects

Chibber’s (2002) critique on the absence of relationships between agencies in India

necessary for effective policy implementation. While coordination between Metro Water

and the Chennai Corporation occurs at the zonal level, at the organizational level, the two

agencies do not frequently coordinate.149

SBM’s public communication tools are no match for these institutional challenges.

The policy’s emphasis on social media usage and the Swachh Survekshan rankings and

certifications have exacerbated two aspects of bureaucratic capacity: the burden of

149 Interview with Dr. Karen Coelho. Chennai, Jul 6, 2019.

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documentation and the “tick-box”150 culture. Appendix C details the indicators in Swachh

Survekshan 2019 that require different types of documentation to be uploaded for

evaluation. The amount of documentation required by SBM led the Deputy Commissioner

of Health at the Chennai Corporation to ask an SBM administrator if the policy was

intended to be about documentation or cleanliness.151 His view was shared by the

Commissioner of the Madurai Corporation who pointed to the importance of

documentation and presentation in achieving a high ranking in Swachh Survekshan,

noting that missing deadlines for uploading data costs cities marks (“Swachh Survekshan”

2018). This suggests that Swachh Survekshan, while framed as an incentive to encourage

agencies to expand their commitment to sanitation, values the ability to document

initiatives and meet deadlines - “thin” tasks according to Pritchett (2014) - over the

capacity to implement sanitation interventions. Here, the concept of audience from the

organizational reputation literature is relevant. The primary audience for municipal

corporations in Swachh Survekshan is the administrators defining the parameters of

implementation and evaluation. Since the administrators appear to reward the

documentation of sanitation efforts over impact of these initiatives, agencies perceive this

exercise as an assessment of their ability to meet documentation deadlines over

improving sanitation outcomes. Perhaps reconstructing the indicators to measure

sanitation outcomes instead of progress in SBM, particularly since the policy was slated

to end in 2019, can help in moving the focus away from SBM’s marketing to the core aim

of the policy - the improvement of sanitation outcomes on the ground.

150 Phone interview with Mr. Somnath Sen. Chennai, Dec 14, 2018. 151 Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Roadmap to Zero Waste in Chennai. Chennai, Nov 9 and 10, 2018.

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SBM’s other communication tools, social media and certifications, have resulted

in agencies checking off “thin” tasks: Post videos of park beautification? Check. Declare

city ODF? Check. Encourage people to use the Swachhata app? Check. The impact of these

activities, however, is limited. Bureaucrats acknowledge the difference between ODF in

SBM and “real” ODF, and their online presence does not have a large enough reach to

merit the term “public communication.” The agencies’ use of these reputational tools are

reminiscent of Pritchett et al.’s (2010) description of isomorphic mimicry in the digital

sphere. Swachh Survekshan encourages agencies to adopt social media in sanitation,

perhaps to mimic the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) social-media-based electoral success

or to mimic viral social media campaigns worldwide.152 The Chennai Corporation was the

only one in the study that questioned the ability of online revolutions to precipitate offline

change.

The use of social media and empty ODF declarations highlight the performative

and emotional dimensions of reputation, where the visibility of the policy and its

unquestioned success are prioritized over improving the relationships within and

between agencies to improve sanitation provision. SBM has also used patriotism to

heighten emotional responses to its campaigns; its aim to declare India ODF by October

2019 was explicitly linked to the realization of one of the dreams Gandhi had about a clean

India. While the reputational strategies that emphasize performative and emotional

dimensions have raised the profile of sanitation in the state, they have not contributed to

the institutional reform needed to improve policy implementation.

152 The BJP’s success in the last two elections has been partly attributed to its ability to use social media platforms to communicate to voters and mobilize their supporters (Jha 2017; Thakurta & Sam 2019). Further, SBM’s desire to trigger a sanitation revolution was initiated by Prime Minister Modi’s interest in replicating the ALS ice bucket challenge that went viral online (PTI 2017; Press Trust of India 2014; FE Online 2014).

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My study also highlighted that state ownership of a national policy matters in

bureaucratic coordination, and organizational reputation plays a part. Indian states have

exercised significant discretion in implementing SBM, exploring different ways of using

this policy to enhance their sanitation efforts. Sanitation Consultant A, for instance,

highlighted how Andhra Pradesh, another South Indian state, instituted a state-level

department called the Swachh Andhra Corporation to smooth the procurement of

equipment needed for SBM implementation (Swachh Andhra website; ANI News

2018).153 In contrast, the Tamil Nadu state government has not undertaken any

significant efforts at the state level for SBM; there are no inter-agency task forces like the

Chennai River Restoration Trust or entities like the Swachh Andhra Corporation to

improve SBM implementation. This could be a result of two factors: 1. The state might be

more interested in implementing its own policies over national ones, and 2. The political

turmoil Tamil Nadu has experienced since 2016 with the deaths of its two rival political

leaders, Ms. J. Jayalalitha and Mr. M. Karunanidhi, has eclipsed its commitment to SBM.

In my interviews, most people agreed that in Tamil Nadu, buy-in at the state level

is needed for policy implementation. Ms. Kavita Wankhade, who leads the Tamil Nadu

Urban Sanitation Support Program (TNUSSP), noted that it would not have come into

existence without the support of the state government and the Municipal Administration

and Water Supply Department (MAWS).154 Ms. Reeba Devaraj and Dr Suneethi Sundar,

also from TNUSSP, were in consensus, asserting that state ownership is needed for a

national priority to be implemented in the state.155 Interestingly, TNUSSP was launched

in 2015, a year after SBM was introduced. Yet, in TNUSSP’s introduction, there is no

153 Interview with Sanitation Consultant A. Coimbatore, Aug 23, 2018. 154 Interview with Ms. Kavita Wankhade. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019. 155 Interview with Ms. Reeba Devaraj and Dr. Suneethi Sundar. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019.

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mention of its overlaps with SBM. The statement simply says it is intended to help the

“Government of Tamil Nadu in its Tamil Nadu Sanitation Mission” (TNUSSP website).

Dr. Karen Coelho from the Madras Institute of Development Studies also declared that

“the culture of Tamil Nadu bureaucracy does not adopt other agendas easily,” and that “if

the top cares, the rest will care.”156 Mr. Phanindra Reddy, the former Principal Secretary

of MAWS, was the lone dissenting voice. He argued that the state will always find a way

to implement national programs.157

I asked my interviewees if a sanitation policy like SBM could be developed at the

state level by the Tamil Nadu government and how it would be different in its

implementation. They overwhelmingly agreed that it was possible but an official at the

Coimbatore Corporation was unsure if the political support for sanitation could exist at

the state level, like it does at the national level for SBM.158 Mr. Kowshik Ganesh from

Athena Infonomics, a global development consultant firm in Chennai, eloquently

summarized how an effective sanitation campaign would be different if it were

implemented by the Tamil Nadu government, instead of the central government. He

argued that people in the state are proud of their Tamil heritage, and that behavioral

change campaigns should leverage this to improve awareness and habits. He described

how these campaigns should highlight the richness of Tamil culture and the contributions

of ancient Tamil kingdoms to the development of water and sanitation infrastructure in

the region. He also declared that famous Kollywood159 stars, like Vijay Sethupathi, should

156 Interview with Dr. Karen Coelho. Chennai, Jul 6, 2019. 157 Interview with Mr. Phanindra Reddy. Chennai, Mar 28, 2019. 158 Phone interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019; Interview with Dr. Srinivasan. Chennai, Mar 26, 2019; Interview with Trichy Corporation officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019; Interview with Mr. Kowshik Ganesh. Chennai, Mar 25, 2019. 159 Kollywood is the Bollywood of Tamil Nadu.

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be featured in the advertising campaigns to better resonate with people in Tamil Nadu.160

Given the state’s preference for regional political parties that highlight Dravidian and

Tamil culture and values in contrast to national Indian parties, Mr. Ganesh’s remarks

emphasize the need for context specificity in “software” strategies.

While the Tamil Nadu government has not created any special inter-agency

coordination mechanisms to implement SBM, it does not mean that it does not have the

ability to do so. The Chennai River Restoration Trust I mentioned in Chapter 3 is widely

acknowledged as one of the more effective inter-agency coordination channels to bring

together representatives from different agencies to clean up the city’s rivers. Further, the

single-use plastic ban implementation that went into effect in January 2019 was a result

of extensive state-wide coordination between different local agencies and the Tamil Nadu

Pollution Control Board.161 The best example of inter-agency coordination as a response

to a reputational threat are the monsoon preparedness meetings that bring together

representatives from different agencies at the state and local levels after the 2015 floods

devastated parts of Chennai. Since then, the state has been hit by two cyclones - Vardah

and Gaja- and floods have ravaged the Nilgiris and Cuddalore (Ravishankar 2019). Local

agencies were blamed for the loss of life and property by the public, especially during the

2015 Chennai floods when relief and rescue operations were slow-moving and piecemeal

(NDMA; Ravishankar 2019). In response, the state government took the initiative to hold

coordination meetings ahead of monsoon seasons to ensure that agencies are aware of

their responsibilities and know how to work together in emergencies (NDMA; “Govt takes

160 Interview with Mr. Kowshik Ganesh. Chennai, Mar 25, 2019. 161 Greater Chennai Corporation. Plastic ban public meeting. Dec 19, 2018.

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stock” 2019). This top-down push for coordination emphasizes that the Tamil Nadu

government is capable of mandating coordination, especially after a reputational loss.

However, SBM’s reputational devices do not seem to have provided enough incentives or

disincentives for the state to encourage inter-agency coordination.

The push for coordination in response to the 2015 floods invites the question: What

kind of a reputational effect are agencies sensitive to in Tamil Nadu, and why has SBM

not been able to create the same conditions to motivate coordination from the state

government? SBM provides both negative and positive reputational incentives; its public

communication devices allow agencies to showcase their commitment to sanitation and

its rankings encourage agencies to perform better if they slip in the rankings, like at the

Trichy Corporation. Further, the Joint Secretary for SBM from the Ministry of Housing

and Urban Affairs pointed out that while some cities like Trichy and Vellore are

performing well in the rankings, the state as a whole needs to improve (Madhavan 2019).

This type of comment, combined with Chennai’s poor past performance in Swachh

Suevekshan, could have spurred the state government to improve sanitation by

mandating coordination. It did not. This suggests that the Tamil Nadu government and

agencies might be more sensitive to criticism from audiences within the state than beyond

the state.

Agency-NGO Coordination

In Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy, coordination depends on historical context,

bureaucratic autonomy, and the relevance of NGOs’ expertise to the priorities of the

municipal corporations. SBM’s reputational devices have empowered the ongoing work

of embedded NGOs in Coimbatore, but have not had an impact in the other two cities. In

Chennai, which currently has no major NGOs as service providers in sanitation, the turn

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toward private-public partnerships in the 2000s ended coordination between NGOs like

Exnora in solid waste management and Sulabh for toilet construction. In Trichy, agency-

NGO coordination happened in toilet construction in the 2000s with NGOs like

Gramalaya and Scope working with the municipal corporation to build community and

public toilets. However, currently, the Trichy Corporation is focusing on solid waste

interventions under SBM, which is not included in the expertise of Gramalaya and Scope,

which focus on water and sanitation.

In Coimbatore, political interference in the municipal corporation and a rich

history of environmental activism have created embedded NGOs in sanitation. NGO

leaders in the city and officials at the Coimbatore Corporation reported that State Minister

for Municipal Administration Mr. S.P. Velumani wields an enormous amount of influence

in the agency, constraining its autonomy.162 Coincidentally, Mr. Velumani is currently

under investigation by the Madras High Court for using his position to award

infrastructure contracts in Tamil Nadu cities to his family and friends (Imranullah 2019;

Sureshkumar 2019). Officials at the Coimbatore Corporation noted that failure to abide

by Mr. Velumani’s wishes would result in the transferring of senior bureaucrats to less

prestigious positions.163 The case of Coimbatore reinforces Iyer and Mani’s (2007; 2012)

insight on the power politicians wield over bureaucracies.

In response to political meddling in the agency, senior bureaucrats, including the

former Commissioner Dr. Vijayakarthikeyan, have become strong supporters of NGOs in

sanitation. Environmental NGOs in Coimbatore have been active in the city, especially

since the acute drought the region faced in 2003. The These NGOs are led by prominent

162 Interview with NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Interview with NGO Leader B. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018. Interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018. 163 Interview with Coimbatore Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018.

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business and industry leaders, reflecting the city’s identity as a business,

entrepreneurship, and industrial hub. As a result, sanitation NGOs in the city have close

ties to the Coimbatore Corporation, and are able to leverage corporate social

responsibility (CSR) funds within their business networks for their efforts. They are also

well connected to community groups and the press, and draw a wide variety of volunteers

from businesses and universities in the area. I thus refer to them as embedded NGOs,

recalling Evans’s (1995) work on embedded autonomy in developmental states. Unlike in

Trichy and Coimbatore, NGOs in Coimbatore focus more on solid waste management

than on toilet construction, which dovetails with the agency’s priorities for SBM.

SBM’s reputational devices to promote the importance of sanitation, like the media

and social media campaigns and the Swachh Survekshan rankings, have empowered the

ongoing efforts of NGOs in Coimbatore. For instance, the leaders of No Dumping

attributed the success of their organization to the introduction of SBM, which helped raise

awareness in households about the importance of waste segregation.164 The performative

dimensions of SBM’s public communication efforts catalyzed existing solid waste

interventions in Coimbatore, particularly in the waste entrepreneurship sector, by

expanding demand for their services in response to the policy’s behavioral change

campaigns.

5.5 Study Limitations

I focused my study on municipal corporations in Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy,

and major NGOs that are service providers in the three cities. The insights on inter-agency

164 Interview with Mr. Prashanth. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018; Interview with Ms. Roopa Prasanth. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018.

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coordination are thus limited to the perspectives of these three agencies, verified with

policy documents from MAWS and media reports. Access to other agencies like Metro

Water, Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board, and Commissionerate of Municipal

Administration was difficult, and even when I did talk to bureaucrats from these agencies,

they preferred to remain off the record because of the sensitive nature of their jobs. For a

more comprehensive look at the type and quality of inter-agency relationships in

sanitation in Tamil Nadu, it would have been useful to conduct interviews or surveys with

all the major agencies in the state and in the three cities to explore if and how the

introduction of SBM changed coordination patterns.

Further, I relied on data from interviews, media reports, and policy documents to

conduct this study. An investigation of relationships between organizations would also

have benefited from social network analysis, mapping out the different types of

relationships between agencies across national, state, and local levels, NGOs, private

sector participants, and community groups, like residential welfare associations. This

method of analysis could provide insights on the diverse landscape of actors in urban

sanitation in the state, and could help municipal corporations and the state government

figure out how to engage with stakeholders to better distribute the work of sanitation

provision.

5.6 What Lessons Can SBM in Tamil Nadu Offer for Urban Sanitation Implementation? SBM has no formal mechanisms for policy evaluation, and this study is one of the

first to investigate its impact on the ground. The case of SBM in Tamil Nadu highlights

three lessons for urban sanitation implementation. First, institutional reform is needed

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at the state and local levels. As my study illustrates, SBM’s reputational devices have

exacerbated weak bureaucratic capacity or have had minimal impact on incentivizing

coordination between agencies and between agencies and NGOs in Tamil Nadu. This

underscores the importance of evaluating the existing institutional environment in cities

to improve sanitation provision, and then addressing its challenges. In Tamil Nadu, for

instance, this could take the form of an inter-agency task force in cities that acts as a nodal

agency between the municipal corporations, the Slum Clearance Board, the Water and

Drainage Board, and Metro Water in Chennai to articulate the different responsibilities

of each agency in contributing to improved sanitation. As Chibber (2002) highlights in

his discussion of the failed Planning Commission, this nodal agency first needs to be

endowed with the authority to discipline agencies for noncompliance. This can only occur

if the state government identifies institutional reform as a major hurdle in sanitation

provision, and provides the inter-agency taskforce with the requisite status. In addition

to addressing relationships between agencies, this task force can emphasize partnerships

with NGOs, community groups, and the private sector to remove some of the pressure

from overburdened agencies. While institutional reform lacks the Bollywood quality of

SBM, it is imperative for the effective roll-out of sanitation policies.

Second, policies and laws dedicated to “higher hanging fruit,” like addressing the

needs and rights of sanitation workers and manual scavengers, need to be enforced. While

SBM has outlined a suite of interventions from slum beautification projects to proper

waste disposal, cities have privileged some over others. In the Tamil Nadu case, the three

cities were focusing their efforts on solid waste management during the study period.

Little attention was paid to the plight of sanitation workers, and the manual scavenging

community continues to be neglected. Some of the indicators in the Swachh Survekshan

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rankings look for evidence of improved working conditions for sanitation workers and

manual scavengers in cities but their needs are not foregrounded in the policy or in the

implementation priorities in the three cities. As Ms. Roopa Prasanth, a behavioral change

expert for No Dumping in Coimbatore, pointed out, the effectiveness of any sanitation

policy rests on sanitation workers who are at the frontline of implementation.165 Media

reports indicate that manual scavenging under SBM has not been addressed (The Wire

2019; Karthikeyan 2018). The Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment recently

admitted that while manual scavenging is technically illegal, no state has reported

convictions for the hiring of manual scavengers (The Wire 2019). Further, the

conversation around sanitation workers is often only focused on the manual scavenging

community, while ignoring other types of sanitation workers who come from different

classes and castes. Subsequent urban sanitation interventions, either at the national,

state, or city level, need to directly address improving the working conditions of sanitation

workers. This does not initially require new policies to be developed but it does necessitate

a political commitment to enforcing existing policies and laws that seek to protect these

communities that are integral to sanitation but invisible.

Third, data on urban sanitation needs to be collected and evaluated in a systematic

and honest manner. While conducting the study, I struggled to find high-quality data on

urban sanitation at the city and state levels. In contrast, I found more granular data on

rural sanitation. While SBM has taken the first step in marketing sanitation reforms to

Indian cities, more attention needs to be paid to the state of urban sanitation in India. If

there is only a piecemeal understanding of what the sanitation challenges are in cities, it

165 Interview with Ms. Roopa Prasanth. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018.

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is not possible to develop targeted interventions to address these problems. Further, the

national and local governments need to stop hiding behind data in touting sanitation

successes, particularly with data that is so easy to disprove like ODF declarations. In SBM

Rural, the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics and the Accountability

Initiative at the Center for Policy Research found that while open defecation rates have

declined during SBM as a response to frenzied toilet construction, villages are not ODF as

the government reported (Vyas 2019; RICE 2019). The report also details the use of

threats and coercion in implementing SBM Rural (Vyas 2019; Rice 2019). While not much

policy evaluation has happened to date in SBM Urban, the Center for Science and

Environment recently reported that third party verifications for Swachh Survekshan 2019

were rushed through in less than a month and that many cities were not visited by these

teams (CSE 2019). Further, the report highlights the over exaggeration of source

segregation and waste processing data announced by the Ministry of Housing and Urban

Affairs (CSE 2019). These troubling reports call into question the validity of the data

collected by SBM and its commitment to sanitation. Is SBM about sanitation or about

political theater?

Eradicating open defecation and creating bin-free cities in a country of over one

billion people in five years is a pipe dream. Even the so-called first world has instances of

open defecation and littering. SBM has indeed created a sanitation revolution in India,

and there are some wins at the end of the policy’s implementation period but not the wins

the ruling party wants. For instance, Dandabathula et al. (2019) find that acute diarrheal

disease has decreased in rural India under SBM. The Research Institute for

Compassionate Economics has found that open defecation has decreased as well in rural

areas (Vyas 2019; RICE 2019). However, these pragmatic wins are not celebrated by the

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national government because they do not fit into the bizarre goal of India being ODF by

Gandhi’s 150th birthday. As a result of this political posturing, SBM is at risk of dimming

the revolution it has started. If India is now ODF according to the “data” and the central

government, then why should state and local governments prioritize sanitation post-

SBM?

5.4 Can SBM be Replicated in Other Contexts?

Combining the Familiar and the Exciting in Policy Implementation

In the world of sanitation, SBM is an unprecedented policy that has moved a

country to thinking and dreaming about sanitation, with the support of politicians from

the highest echelons of government and celebrities from the highest ranks of Bollywood.

SBM has elevated the importance of sanitation because of how rooted in Indian culture

its programming has been. The use of Gandhi’s writing, his glasses as the logo, and his

statue given out as prizes for cities who perform well in Swachh Survekshan have unified

a country that is deeply fractured on political, religious, class, and ethnolinguistic lines in

its quest to improve sanitation. Dr. Srinivasan, who heads the Information, Education,

and Communication activities for SBM at the Chennai Corporation, mentioned that he

gets a “Father of the Nation feeling” whenever he sees SBM campaigns with references to

Gandhi.166 Besides invoking Gandhi, the elements of competition, rankings, and rewards

featured in SBM are embedded in everyday Indian life, particularly in the education

system and in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Dr. Srinivasan, along with other

interviewees from municipal corporations and NGOs, argued that without a system of

166 Interview with Dr. Srinivasan. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018.

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evaluation and competition like Swachh Survekshan, there would be no incentive to

motivate action around sanitation.167 To reinforce their points, these interviewees used

the analogy of the Indian education system and questioned if students would study if

there were no exams, grades, or rankings.

Here, David Stark’s (2011; 2017) insights on the value of rankings shed light on

how the performance of praising and prizing can confer value, especially to non-market

goods like the toilet or the trash can. For example, in SBM, latrines and open defecation

rates derive value from being part of the city rankings. Stark (2011) also illustrates how

the performance of prizing and praising of a good can add “symbolic properties [even to]

the most profane of items” (p. 16). He points to how the marketing of a can of paint in a

Home Depot commercial turns paint into a symbol of marital bliss when a couple beams

contentedly together in their freshly painted house (Stark 2011). Sanitation challenges in

different cities are inextricably tied to contextual factors, more so than in other sectors,

because of their cultural, religious, and political dimensions. Thus, its interventions

should reflect that context sensitivity, as SBM has attempted to do. Mr. Kowshik Ganesh’s

comments on how SBM would look very different if designed by the Tamil Nadu

government reinforce how important and localized context is, especially for behavioral

change campaigns. While the policy as a whole cannot be mechanically replicated in China

or Kenya, it emphasizes the value of employing prominent cultural symbols and policy

elements familiar to the society at large, and communicating them in a manner that is

exciting but not outlandish. As Michael Hutter asserted in Stark (2011), “familiar

167 Interview with Mr. Prashanth. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018; Interview with Ms. Roopa Prasanth. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018; Mr. Sai Damodaran. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018; Interview with Dr. Srinivasan. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018; Sulabh International Officials. Chennai, Dec 4, 2018; Trichy Corporation Officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019.

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surprises combining thrill with comfort are the most frequent and successful commercial

variety.”

While SBM demonstrates its context awareness in its use of reputational tools to

overhaul the image of sanitation and everything and everyone associated with it, it has

not fully leveraged this to trigger institutional reform. The policy employs a “rising tide

lifts all boats” attitude to sanitation, assuming that in its enthusiastic marketing of the

policy itself and its various levers like the app, social media, and rankings, the excitement

generated would be enough to create behavioral change in people and agencies. However,

as my study shows, agencies are limited by their existing institutional characteristics in

bureaucratic coordination. Instead of assuming that agencies would be moved to

coordinate to augment their reputation and participate in the revolution, SBM could use

existing bureaucratic culture to its advantage. For instance, to complement the “tick-

box”168 culture in agencies, Swachh Survekshan could add indicators under the capacity

building category specifically on coordinating with other agencies and with NGOs in

improving sanitation outcomes. Further, SBM could conflate future iterations of Swachh

Survekshan with existing rankings and reward mechanisms, like the Nagar Ratna (Best

City) awards, to more holistically evaluate the ability of urban bureaucracies to fulfill their

mandates.

Visibility in Sanitation in the Age of Social Media

SBM responded to Rose George’s (2008) lament of the invisibility of sanitation by

launching extensive media and social media campaigns, and encouraging agencies and

citizen groups to use SBM’s online platforms. The Deputy Commissioner of Health at the

168 Phone interview with Mr. Somnath Sen. Chennai, Dec 14, 2018.

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Chennai Corporation critiqued this social media culture of privileging visibility over

impact at the Roadmap to Zero Waste Conference in Chennai.169 He described how after

SBM was introduced, community groups in the city have started to approach the

Corporation to offer their help with beach clean-up efforts. However, all of these groups

want to clean up the same beach - the Besant Nagar beach - because it is pleasant and

convenient to access, and thus, eminently Instagrammable (Figure 13). When the

Corporation pointed out that this beach was already fairly clean and that they had a list

of other beaches that could be cleaned, the groups lost interest because those places are

difficult to get to and are in need of actual work. The Deputy Commissioner argued that

these groups want visibility without the effort, which is exacerbated by the use of social

media. This serves as a cautionary tale to other cities or countries thinking about using

social media as a platform to communicate behavioral interventions in different sectors.

As Mr. Phanindra Reddy, Dr. Srinivasan, and the Deputy Commissioner of Health in

Chennai have highlighted, the use of online interventions does not appear to trigger

offline change.

169 Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Roadmap to Zero Waste in Chennai. Chennai, Nov 9 and 10, 2018.

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Figure 13: Besant Nagar beach (Photo by author)

The desire for visibility without the effort can also be used to describe some aspects

of SBM that privilege publicity over sanitation reform. Mr. Somnath Sen, a policy

consultant with the TNUSSP, eviscerated the many pictures of Prime Minister Modi

holding up a broom to demonstrate his commitment to cleanliness. Mr. Sen pointed out

that the Prime Minister and other senior bureaucrats “carefully picked up the broom, and

not the shit.”170 He was referring more generally to the performance of improving

sanitation that SBM prioritizes instead of the work that is needed to be done to make India

open-defecation- and bin- free: behavioral change, institutional reform, and improving

sanitation infrastructure and access. Mr. Rajesh Subburaj, also from TNUSSP,

emphasized that in SBM’s quest to elevate sanitation’s visibility, the needs of the

perennially invisible communities in sanitation have not been adequately addressed.171

He explained how floating populations, manual scavengers, and sanitation workers, who

170 Phone interview with Mr. Somnath Sen. Chennai, Dec 14, 2018. 171 Interview with Mr. Rajesh Subburaj. Coimbatore, Dec 10, 2018.

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are at the frontline of any sanitation revolution, are largely ignored by this policy. Thus,

efforts at raising awareness of a particular policy issue need to be accompanied by

questions of who wants visibility, for whom, and who is left out of this conversation.

5.5 Beyond SBM: Coordination and Urban Sanitation

While documenting the physical environments of the three municipal corporations

in my field notes, I noticed that the spatial characteristics of the three municipal

corporations somewhat reflected their internal cohesion. Offices at the Trichy

Corporation, for instance, are located mostly in one three-story building, corresponding

to the centralized nature of its management (Figures 14 and 15). The Coimbatore

Corporation’s offices are spread out over a few short buildings (Figures 16 and 17). The

Chennai Corporation is split between one sprawling old building from the early 20th

century and a six-story, glass-forward building, constructed in 2015 (Figures 18 and 19).

The layers of the Chennai Corporation’s labyrinthine bureaucracy are mirrored in its

spatial form. Investigating the architecture of coordination to explore links between the

physical spaces occupied by agencies and their activities could add to the study of agency

behavior.

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Figure 14: Trichy Corporation (Photo by author)

Figure 15. Courtyard of the Trichy Corporation (Photo by author)

158

Figure 16. Coimbatore Corporation (Photo by author)

Figure 17. Part of the Coimbatore Corporation campus (Photo by author)

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Figure 18. Ripon Building, Chennai Corporation (Photo by author)

Figure 19. Amma Maligai, Chennai Corporation (Photo by author)

Finally, the Chennai Corporation is thinking about submitting a proposal to the

state government to merge with Metro Water, as part of its desire to bring all civic services

within the same agency to improve coordination and implementation (Gautham 2019).

160

So far, I have only found one Times of India article on it and my interviewees in Chennai

said they were not familiar with the operationalization of this intention. However, the

article raises an interesting debate between inter-agency coordination and agency

mergers. On one hand, an engineer at the Corporation emphasized that if the two agencies

merged, Metro Water and the Chennai Corporation could work together more efficiently

to expand formal coverage of water and sewer lines (Gautham 2019). However, a former

IAS officer pointed out that coordination is not the main problem with the two agencies,

but Byzantine governance systems (Gautham 2019). A Metro Water engineer agreed

saying that mergers are not the answer since every agency experiences coordination

challenges in the city (Gautham 2019). These differing views on how to address

coordination in the water and sanitation sector present an interesting question for future

research on the potential efficacy of creating one agency to oversee municipal

administration. Is a super-bureaucracy the answer to coordination challenges? My study

suggests otherwise. While merging with Metro Water can superficially bring together

water and sanitation implementation within the same agency, it is not a guarantee for

improved coordination or a replacement for weak bureaucratic capacity or administrative

incoherence already present within bureaucracies. If such a move were to occur, the state

government and senior bureaucrats at both agencies need to ensure that clear

relationships between departments need to be articulated before the merger, and that

capacity issues are adequately addressed to improve service provision on the ground.

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Epilogue on Positionality

As a dark-skinned woman of South Indian descent, who is fluent in Tamil (but

distinctly not of the Chennai kind) and vaguely foreign, I was a source of confusion and

amusement in Tamil Nadu. During fieldwork, I was often mistaken for an IAS officer,

someone who wanted to be an IAS officer, a World Bank consultant, and a college student.

While my affiliation with MIT and Resilient Chennai expanded my access to decision-

makers in the environmental sanitation sector in Chennai, I realized it was my heritage

and ability to speak Tamil that smoothed my way in Coimbatore and Trichy. Even before

starting the PhD, I was interested in why and how researchers choose where to work, and

how these choices converge in the over- and under-representation of certain cities and

regions. In India, there is so much scholarship in urban development featuring Mumbai,

Kolkata, New Delhi, and increasingly, Bangalore, with much less attention given to other

cities in southern or northeastern India. While studying these areas home to research

“bubbles”172 can be helpful given the amount of information already available and an

existing research infrastructure, it may also simplify and distort views on a particular

issue if these cities are presented as being representative of a region or country. For

instance, before I started fieldwork in 2017, newspaper articles on SBM in India were

framing the policy as a massive push to end open defecation and increase toilet

production. What I found in Tamil Nadu was different. The three cities were channeling

their efforts in solid waste management instead, leveraging SBM’s visibility efforts to

address a problem they had spent years working on.

172 Randy Schekman, an American cell biologist who won the Nobel prize in 2013, described these research “bubbles” as a result of academic pressure to publish on fashionable topics and methods, while ignoring other lines of inquiry (Schekman 2013).

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The people I met in Coimbatore and Trichy were surprised that I had visited them

all the way from Boston, Massachusetts, to ask them about their perspectives on SBM and

bureaucratic coordination. Some of them said that they did not think researchers were

interested in their cities. My interviews and conversations with them often lasted for

several hours, while they patiently answered my questions and generously shared their

expertise with me. These usually ended with a cup of coffee or tea and snacks, when they

asked about my grandparents and their connections to Tamil Nadu. They often felt

protective of me when I was in Coimbatore or Trichy. They made sure that I had safe and

comfortable transportation and accommodation, and invited me over for meals with their

families so that I would not feel lonely. I was surprised by these overwhelmingly kind and

hospitable gestures, having never spent much time in Tamil Nadu before. My friend in

India referred to this as the “nalla Thamizh ponnu” (good Tamil girl) effect, noting that

they probably felt a sense of kinship with me over our shared heritage and language,

without questioning my right to do research in the region. This was an issue that

occasionally comes up for me when I meet Indian scholars from outside Tamil Nadu,

mainly from North India, who become defensive and territorial when they learn that I am

writing my dissertation on India but I am not from there. My fieldwork experience in

Tamil Nadu and the reactions from scholars from other parts of India led me to reflect on

who has the right to research a particular place and if and how that right is tied to the

researcher’s ethnicity, national origin, and language abilities.

Another unexpected element during my fieldwork was how comfortable the men I

spoke to were in discussing different aspects of sanitation with me. Around 60 to 70

percent of my interviews were with men, and I had mentally steeled myself beforehand

about expecting potential awkwardness in talking about issues like toilet habits,

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defecation, and urination. I was surprised by how open and knowledgeable the men I

spoke to were about describing the various problems in sanitation experienced by both

men and women. I often found myself in situations when men or groups of men were

earnestly telling me about the importance of including menstrual hygiene management

in sanitation policies, and their anger and frustration at how the women in their lives are

made to feel ashamed about menstruating or when purchasing sanitary products. On one

hand, this nuanced and mature perspective on highlighting cultural taboos in

menstruation in India and how they disproportionately affect women came from men in

the environmental sanitation sector who have studied and worked extensively on this

challenge. On the other hand, the lack of embarrassment they felt in discussing those

deeply private issues with me was refreshing and not what I am accustomed to, even in

the United States.

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Appendix A: Partial List of Interviews

1. Ms. Vijayalakshmi Murali, environmental leader. Coimbatore, Jul 16, 2018.

2. Mr. Selvaraj, environmentalist, Kowsika Nathi. Phone interview. Chennai, Aug 16, 2018.

3. Mr. Prashanth, social entrepreneur in waste, No Dumping, ASLRM, Swachh Bharat ambassador. Coimbatore, Aug 20, 2018.

4. Mr. R. Raveendran, RAAC. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018.

5. NGO Leader A. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018.

6. Ms. Roopa Prasanth, environmentalist. Coimbatore, Aug 21, 2018.

7. Ms. Timple Luloo, SBM Ambassador. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018.

8. NGO Leader B. Coimbatore, Aug 22, 2018.

9. NGO Leaders C and D. Coimbatore, Aug 23, 2018.

10. Sanitation Consultant A. Coimbatore, Aug 23, 2018.

11. Zonal sanitary officer. Coimbatore, Aug 24, 2018.

12. Mr. Roosevelt, Project Coordinator, Shunya Project and ICLEI. Coimbatore, Aug

24, 2018.

13. Sanitation Consultant B. Coimbatore, Aug 24, 2018.

14. Sanitary supervisor. Coimbatore, Aug 24, 2018.

15. Trichy City Corporation officials. Trichy, Sep 4, 2018.

16. Mr. Sai Damodaran, CEO of Gramalaya. Trichy, Sep 5, 2018.

17. Gramalaya team. Trichy, Sep 5 and Sep 6, 2018.

18. Ms. D. Vijula, SBM nodal officer and executive engineer, Greater Chennai Corporation. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018.

19. SBM team, Greater Chennai Corporation. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018.

20. Dr. Srinivasan, Head of IEC for SBM, Greater Chennai Corporation. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018.

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21. Senior Bureaucrat A. Chennai, Nov 23, 2018.

22. Ms. Kavita Wankhade, Team Leader, Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Program. Chennai, Nov 28, 2018.

23. Mr. Siddharth Hande, Founder/CEO of Kabbadiwala Connect. Phone interview. Chennai, Nov 28, 2018.

24. Sulabh International officials. Chennai, Dec 4, 2018.

25. Mr. Phanindra Reddy, Principal Secretary/Commissioner at Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department. Chennai, Dec 6, 2018.

26. Senior Bureaucrat B. Chennai, Dec 6, 2018.

27. Mr. Rajesh Subburaj, Senior Community Sanitation Coordinator, Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Program and Keystone Foundation. Coimbatore, Dec 10, 2018.

28. Coimbatore City Municipal Corporation officials. Coimbatore, Dec 11, 2018.

29. Ms. Anusha Ananthakrishnan, Outreach Coordinator, Siruthuli. Coimbatore, Dec 12, 2018.

30. Mr. Krishnamohan Ramachandran, Chief Resilience Officer, Resilient Chennai. Chennai, Dec 14, 2018.

31. Mr. Arjun Bhargava, Resilience Manager, Resilient Chennai. Chennai, Dec 14, 2018.

32. Mr. Somnath Sen, Advisor, Institutional Development and Strategy, Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Program. Phone interview. Chennai, Dec 14, 2018.

33. Assistant Executive Engineer, Greater Chennai Corporation. Chennai, Dec 21, 2018.

34. Mr. Kowshik Ganesh, Senior Lead, Athena Infonomics. Chennai, Mar 25, 2019.

35. Sanitation Consultant C. Chennai, Mar 25, 2019.

36. Dr. Srinivasan, Head of IEC for SBM, Greater Chennai Corporation. Chennai,

Mar 26, 2019.

37. Mr. Phanindra Reddy, Principal Secretary/Commissioner at Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department. Chennai, Mar 28, 2019.

38. Trichy City Corporation officials. Trichy, May 29, 2019.

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39. Mr. M. Subburaman, CEO of Scope. Trichy, May 29, 2019.

40. Mr. N. Ravichandran, Commissioner of Trichy City Corporation. Trichy, May 29,

2019.

41. Mr. Sai Damodaran, CEO of Gramalaya. Phone interview. Trichy, May 30, 2019.

42. Mr. Roosevelt, Project Coordinator, Shunya Project and ICLEI. Phone interview. Chennai, Jul 2, 2019.

43. Ms. Kavita Wankhade, Team Leader, Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Program. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019.

44. Ms. Reeba Devaraj, Senior Specialist, Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Program. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019.

45. Dr. Suneethi Sundar, Specialist, Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Program. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019.

46. Coimbatore City Municipal Corporation officials. Phone interview. Chennai, Jul 3, 2019.

47. Ms. Vanessa Peter, Policy Researcher at Information and Resource Center for Deprived Urban Communities. Phone interview, Chennai, Jul 4, 2019.

48. Dr. Karen Coelho, Assistant Professor at Madras Institute of Development Studies. Chennai, Jul 6, 2019.

49. Mr. Rajesh Subburaj, Senior Community Sanitation Coordinator, Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Program and Keystone Foundation. Email interview. Singapore, Aug 20, 2019.

Event List

1. U.S. Consulate General in Chennai, Paperman Foundation of India, and the Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Tamil Nadu Plastic Ban: A Solutions Mapping Meeting. Chennai, Sep 11, 2018.

2. Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group (CAG) Workshop. Rethinking Urbanization and Right to the City. Chennai, Oct 2, 2018.

3. Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Roadmap to Zero Waste in Chennai. Chennai, Nov 9 and 10, 2018.

4. Greater Chennai Corporation. Plastic ban public meeting. Dec 19, 2018.

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5. Resilient Chennai Strategy Launch. Chennai, Jun 27, 2019.

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Appendix B: Interview Protocol A. Verbal Consent Script

Before the interview Thank you for taking the time to meet with me. Poor sanitation is a common problem in India, and the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission hopes to improve the situation. In my dissertation for my PhD at MIT, I am interested in understanding the role of bureaucracies in implementing Swachh Bharat in cities. This interview is voluntary – you can stop the interview at any time or ask me to move onto the next question if you don’t want to answer it. In my dissertation, I will list all of my interviewees by name or general title (e.g. Policy Analysis, Organization XYZ, City Name). If you prefer to remain anonymous, please let me know now or after the interview. Unless you give me permission to use your name, title, and/or quote you in any publications that may result from this research, the information you tell me will be confidential. All notes and interview recordings are coded with initials and dates to maintain anonymity. I am planning to finish data collection by June 2019. Do you have any questions before we begin? Do you mind if I take notes? You can tell me at any point during the interview if you wish to say something off the record. After the interview Can I use your name in my interview? How do you wish to be described in my dissertation in terms of name and designation? Can I directly quote you or should I paraphrase? If I have follow-up questions, may I contact you? Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns - you have my contact information.

B. Interview Themes for Bureaucracies

1. Information on interviewee’s role and department responsibilities 2. What are the city’s main sanitation challenges? 3. What activities has the agency undertaken for SBM? How is this similar or different

to before SBM? What motivated any changes? a. Use of social media and Swachhata app b. What types of behavioral change campaigns do they undertake? What

communities do they focus on and why? 4. Opinion on SBM’s success in Tamil Nadu and their city

a. Effectiveness of rankings and certifications in motivating action b. How do they define success? Sanitation? c. City characteristics (identity, culture, civic participation, politics - national,

state, local) d. What advice would they give other cities who want to be successful at SBM?

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e. Can Tamil Nadu implement an SBM-like sanitation policy? How would it be different?

5. Challenges faced in implementing SBM a. What areas of the city have been hard to implement SBM in? Why? What

areas have been easier? Why? C. Interview Themes for NGOs

1. Information on organization’s mandate and past work 2. What are the city’s main sanitation challenges? 3. What is the NGO’s connection to SBM? 4. What types of communities do they work with? What kind of work do they do? 5. Relationships with different agencies, particularly the Corporation

a. Has there been a change in relationship with the Corporation after SBM was introduced?

6. What other stakeholders do they work with? 7. Opinion on SBM’s success in Tamil Nadu and their city

a. Effectiveness of rankings and certifications in motivating action b. Use of social media and the app c. City characteristics (identity, culture, civic participation, politics - national,

state, local) d. How do they define success? Sanitation? e. Can Tamil Nadu implement an SBM-like sanitation policy? How would it be

different? 8. Challenges in implementing SBM in their city

a. What are they, and how can they be addressed? b. Who should address them? c. Who is left out in SBM?

D. Interview Themes for Consultants, Academics, Activists, and Journalists

1. Information on organization’s work and interviewee’s responsibilities 2. What are the city’s main sanitation challenges? 3. Who are the main stakeholders in sanitation provision in their city?

a. Do they work together? Why or why not? 4. Opinion on SBM’s success in Tamil Nadu and their city

a. Effectiveness of rankings and certifications in motivating action b. Use of social media and the app c. City characteristics (identity, culture, civic participation, politics - national,

state, local) d. What changed, if anything, after SBM was introduced? Why? e. How do they define success? Sanitation? f. Can Tamil Nadu implement an SBM-like sanitation policy? How would it be

different? 5. Challenges in implementing SBM in their city.

a. What are they, and how can they be addressed? b. Who should address them? c. Who is left out in SBM?

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E. Interview Questions on Coordination for Bureaucracies 1. Inter-agency coordination

a. Has the state mandated any CRRT-type mechanism to improve inter-agency coordination for SBM?

b. Do you collaborate with other agencies to implement SBM? If so, which ones (e.g. CMA, Metro Water, Slum Clearance Board, CMDA etc.)? How long have you been working with them on sanitation?

c. What are the challenges of coordinating with other agencies? 2. Intra-agency coordination

a. What departments are involved in implementing SBM? b. How often do the departments meet? Has there been a change in frequency

after SBM? 3. Agency-NGO coordination

a. Do you work with any NGOs in the city to implement SBM? If so, which ones? How long have you been working with them?

b. What types of work do the NGOs do? What kind of information do they have that is useful for your job?

c. What kinds of activities do you undertake with them for SBM? d. Do you conduct behavioral change campaigns together or do NGOs conduct

them? Why? e. Do you work with any other organizations besides NGOs to implement

SBM? 4. SBM’s reputational devices

a. What types of certifications are you working toward? (e.g. ODF, Star Garbage Rating)

b. Does the agency use social media to publicize SBM? If so, what types do you use? How useful do you find social media in communicating with the public?

c. What is your opinion about the usefulness about the Swachhata app for your job?

d. Besides these efforts, what offline efforts have you undertaken for SBM? (e.g. improving “hardware,” in person behavioral change campaigns)

5. Bureaucratic capacity and administrative coherence a. Have there been any seconded positions to implement SBM? b. What types of work do SBM teams do, in addition to implementing SBM?

6. Relationships with politicians - local, state, national a. Have local politicians been helpful in raising awareness about Swachh

Survekshan? b. Are there politicians who have been policy champions for sanitation before

SBM? c. How would you describe relationships between politicians and the

Corporation? Has SBM had an impact on these relationships? 7. Civic participation

a. How do you think the lack of local elections affects SBM implementation, if it does?

b. Before 2016, how did you find the experience of working with ward councilors for sanitation projects?

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F. Interview Questions on Coordination for NGOs

1. Agency-NGO coordination a. Do you work with the Corporation to implement SBM? Why or why not? If

you do, who is your primary contact? b. Have you previously coordinated with the Corporation for sanitation

projects? If so, what types of activities did you undertake together? How would you describe the experience of working with the Corporation?

c. What organizations, besides the Corporation, do you work with? 2. SBM’s reputational devices

a. What is your opinion on SBM’s emphasis on online platforms, like social media and the Swachhata app? In your opinion, how useful are online efforts in creating behavioral change?

b. What is your opinion on the effectiveness of Swachh Survekshan rankings? 3. Relationships with politicians - local, state, national

a. How do you navigate relationships with local politicians in your work? b. Are there politicians who have been policy champions for sanitation before

SBM? c. How would you describe relationships between politicians and the

Corporation? Has SBM had an impact on these relationships? 4. Civic participation

a. How do you think the lack of local elections affects SBM implementation, if it does?

b. Before 2016, how did you find the experience of working with ward councilors and the mayor for sanitation projects?

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Appendix C: List of Swachh Survekshan 2019 Indicators173 A. Breakdown of Marks

Component Percent of Total Marks (%) Number of Marks Certifications 25 (20 for Star Rating; 5 for

ODF Rating) 1250

Direct Observation 25 1250 Service Level Progress 25 1250 Citizen Feedback 25 1250

Total 100% 5000 Marks B. List of Service Level Progress Indicators in Solid Waste Management

No. Type Indicator Examples of Documentation Marks 1 Collection &

Transportation % of wards covered with door-to-door waste collection

Number and capacity of vehicles deployed; ward-level staff deployment plan

45

2 Collection & Transportation

% of wards practicing source segregation

Total number of dry/wet waste generated; log books of transfer stations

65

3 Collection & Transportation

ICT-based monitoring mechanism Screenshot of app(s); copy of GPS/RFID log 50

4 Collection & Transportation

% of informal waste pickers formally integrated into sustainable livelihoods

Copy of recent survey report/study of identification of informal waste pickers; copy of contract with private sector and community groups that have enrolled informal waste pickers

40

5 Collection & Transportation

Benefits extended to sanitary workers

Pictorial documentation of usage of personal protective equipment; evidence of health benefits

55

6 Collection & Transportation

100% of wards are clean in ULB Evidence of sweeping twice a day; evidence of beautification and clean-up of vulnerable areas

65

7 Collection & Transportation

Is the city bin-free? Mechanism of waste management, post-bins; evidence of ICT monitoring systems

18

8 Processing and Disposal

% of total wet waste collected that is treated

No. of decentralized waste processing units in the city; evidence of home-based waste processing

60

9 Processing and Disposal

% of dry waste collected that is treated

Mechanism in place for domestic hazardous waste; evidence of waste processing facilities

60

10 Processing and Disposal

Mechanism to manage construction and demolition waste

Public notification for waste services; evidence of functional waste helpline

50

11 Processing and Disposal

Remediation of existing dumpsites undertaken

Pictures of remediated dumpsites; waste management model

40

12 Processing and Disposal

Sanitary landfill/zero landfill city? Photo of landfill; log books of amount of waste dumped in landfill

50

13 Processing and Disposal

% of operational cost of environmental sanitation covered by different sources of funding like taxes and ads

Evidence of property taxes with sub-heading for sanitation charges; total revenue from sale of compost

50

14 Processing and Disposal

% of bulk waste generators with on-site processing

List of bulk waste generators; visual evidence of on-site processing

50

15 Processing and Disposal

% of households processing their wet waste at home

Ward-level evidence of processing; quantity of wet waste processed

15

Total Marks 713

173 Information in this Appendix is taken from the Swachh Survekshan Toolkit 2019. Please refer to this document for more details.

198

C. List of Service Level Progress Indicators for Toilets

No. Type Indicator Examples of Documentation Marks 1 Sustainable

Sanitation % of toilets connected to a closed system

Log book details on desludging vehicles; ward-level details on septic tanks

70

2 Sustainable Sanitation

% of fecal sludge treated at treatment plant

Details of operational treatment plants; treatment capacity

48

3 Sustainable Sanitation

% of completed individual household latrines with water

List of SBM toilets constructed; list of households with functional water connection in latrines

45

4 Sustainable Sanitation

Are all public toilets uploaded as SBM toilet in Google maps?

Toilet data should be uploaded on MoHUA dashboard

60

5 Sustainable Sanitation

% of CT/PTs open between 4am and 10pm

Toilet data should be uploaded on MoHUA dashboard

30

6 Sustainable Sanitation

Toilet facilities in construction sites?

List of toilets with pictures; copy of permission issued for construction

30

7 Sustainable Sanitation

% of operation and maintenance costs of CT/PTs recovered through revenue streams

Copy of user fee collected; total costs of operation and maintenance; details of desludging operators

30

Total Marks 313 D. List of Service Level Progress Indicators for IEC & Behavior Change

No. Type Indicator Examples of Documentation Marks 1 IEC & Behavioral

Change Was Swachh Survekshan promoted in the city?

Details of ULB and citizen campaigns uploaded on Swachh Manch; evidence of dissemination through social media; list of organizations engaged

23

2 IEC & Behavioral Change

Short movie/audio jingle created by ULB/citizens for circulation through social media?

List of content created; evidence of dissemination through Swachh Manch and social media and coverage

20

3 IEC & Behavioral Change

Citizen-led campaigns? Visual evidence; evidence of dissemination through social media

20

Total Marks 63 E. List of Service Level Progress Indicators for Capacity Building

No. Type Indicator Examples of Documentation Marks 1 Capacity Building % of staff who have completed

certifications on e-learning courses in SBM portal

List of SBM-related staff; list of staff who have completed courses

19

2 Capacity Building % of staff from Sanitation and Engineering departments who have attended at least 3 SBM workshops

Copy of workshop agenda; visual evidence or newspaper coverage; copy of attendance record; contact details of staff

18

Total Marks 37 F. List of Service Level Progress Indicators for By-Laws and Regulations

No. Type Indicator Examples of Documentation Marks 1 By-Laws and

Regulations Has the ULB notified and enforced Plastic Waste Management Rules 2016?

Copy of notification; copy of fine receipts issued; evidence of mechanism for checking of plastic usage

17

2 By-Laws and Regulations

Are measures in place for user fee and penalties for open defecation, public urination, and littering?

Copy of notifications; copy of receipt books for fines; list of vulnerable spots

15

3 By-Laws and Regulations

Has the ULB notified and enforced the Solid Waste Management Rules 2016?

Copy of notification; copy of fine receipts 15

4 By-Laws and Regulations

Has the ULB notified and enforced user charges from waste generators?

Copy of notification; copy of receipt books 15

Total Marks 62

199

G. List of Service Level Progress Indicators for Innovation and Best Practices

No. Type Indicator Examples of Documentation Marks 1 Innovation and

Best Practices Quality of project submitted by ULB

Documentation and photos of project 40

2 Innovation and Best Practices

Quality of citizen-led project submitted by ULB

Documentation and photos of project 22

Total Marks 62 H. List of Indicators for Certifications

No. Type Indicator Examples of Documentation Marks 1 Star Garbage

Rating Is the city certified under the Star Rating Protocol?

Information on SBM portal/assessment report of third-party agency

1,000

2 ODF Status Which ODF status does the city have?

Recommendations of third-party agency 250

Total Marks 1,250 I. List of Indicators for Direct Observation

No. Indicators Marks 1 Are residential and commercial areas clean? 200 2 Are CT/PTs clean and user-friendly? 250 3 Are CT/PTs prominently displaying SBM messages with Swachh Survekshan logo? 80 4 Are CT/PTs connected to safe onsite disposal system? 80 5 Are all markets clean? 170 6 Are transportation hubs clean? 170 7 Are billboards and posters visible in public areas? 100 8 Visible beautification undertaken of slums, old areas, flyover, and public spaces? 200

Total Marks 1,250

J. List of Indicators for Citizen Feedback

No. Indicators Marks 1 Are you aware that your city is participating in Swachh Survekshan 2019? 125 2 Are you satisfied with the cleanliness level in your city? 125 3 Are you able to easily spot litter bins in commercial and public areas? 125 4 Are you asked to segregate wet and dry waste by your waste collector? 125 5 Do you know where you waste goes after collection? 100 6 Do you find toilets accessible and clean now? 125 7 Do you know the ODF status of your city? 125 8 Number of active users on Swachhata app/Swachh Manch? 100 9 % of complaints on app resolved within Service Level Agreement time frame 100 10 % of population that has downloaded Swachhata app and/or joined Swachh Manch 100

11 User feedback on resolved complaints 100 Total Marks 1,250