CITY SANITATION PLAN - Ministry of Urban Development

CITY SANITATION PLAN BAREILLY
improvement on the old supply driven approach, the pure demand-responsive approach is also
inadequate in a number of respects.
It is based on what intended service users know, thus limiting scope for change and
innovation.
It ignores the fact that service users are likely to be concerned only with their immediate
surroundings, so that demand for local improvements may be at the expense of the wider
environment.
In equating demand with willingness to pay, it perhaps overlooks the fact that the main
problem may be either that sanitation providers are unwilling to charge users for the full
cost of services, or that poor people are unable to pay for the full cost of the services.
It fails to pay sufficient attention to the capacity of service deliverers to respond to demand.
This is a particularly important point where existing service delivery systems are weak.
The market correlation approach
The approach assumes that sanitation is a commodity that should be sold like any other commodity,
for instance a car. People should therefore be offered a range of sanitation options from which they
can choose. This approach has two basic drawbacks:
It assumes that individual sanitation users can act independently of one another with each
achieving the optimum result for him or her. In practice, this is rarely the case and people
need to act together if the best results are to be achieved.
It ignores the fact that different stakeholders may have different objectives. There is a real
danger that the choices of community members will relate to their immediate needs and
ignore the wider environmental implications of their sanitation choices.
The user knows best approach
This approach assumes that sanitation-related choices should be based solely on user preferences
and that the role of professionals is to facilitate those choices. It underestimates the value of
'professional' knowledge. Like the market analogy approach, it assumes that all stakeholders have
the same priorities and will act as a coherent group at the local level. These weaknesses mean that
the approach encourages local ad-hoc activity at the expense of overall planning. For example;
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