Nearly 100 towns in Uttarakhand have prepared their first Town Action Plans (TAPs) for sanitation.
Plans prioritise awareness, monitoring, and worker safety alongside technical upgrades.
High-altitude, mid-altitude and plains towns each propose context-specific solutions.
More than 500 sanitation activities have been coded and categorised across the state.
Uttarakhand’s TAPs could provide a blueprint for mountain sanitation across the Indian Himalayan Region.
Something quiet revolutionary has just happened in Uttarakhand.
Over nine weeks, nearly 100 Urban Local Bodies (ULB), from the floodplains of Haridwar to the high ridges of Pithoragarh, prepared their first structured town action plans (TAP) for faecal sludge, septage and used water management during district-wise workshops conducted by think tank National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA). These were not symbolic exercises. They were drawn up by municipal officials who walk the drains, resolve complaints and grapple with budgets year after year.
These TAPs, created as part of the operationalisation of the state’s septage management protocol workshops, reflect something rare in sanitation planning: grounded and well-founded intent. With over 500 activities coded and categorised, we now have an extraordinary opportunity to understand where Uttarakhand’s towns want to go — and what is holding them back.
To decode these plans, we examined the frequency of key terms — words that recurred across towns and districts. Each keyword corresponds to tangible activities, allowing us to measure intent and scale.
Here’s what the data shows:
A few trends stand out.
First, there is overwhelming emphasis on awareness and interface. IEC, behaviour change and registration top the list. This shows ULBs are thinking not only about infrastructure but also about public service and systems. They want citizens to know the rules and operators to be visible and accountable. Sanitation is being framed as a service, not a last resort.
Second, towns want visibility and control. Monitoring, GPS and surveys dominate. These are tools of governance: knowing where septic tanks are, who is emptying them, how often and whether it is safe.
Third, the administration is getting serious about delivery. Technical terms like site selection, procurement, training, DPR formulation and bye-law updates reflect awareness of existing gaps and a readiness to plug them through structured planning, formal upgrades and financial foresight.
Uttarakhand is not a typical state; its irregular terrain, plains, slopes, valleys and ridges dramatically shapes sanitation planning. Priorities vary with geography, demography and climate.
Settled on slopes and valleys with steep gradients, fractured land parcels and freezing winters, these towns rarely find sewer lines viable. Septic tanks are scattered, desludging is seasonal and land for treatment plants is scarce. TAPs here call for detailed household surveys, careful site selection for shared treatment units, strong inter-departmental coordination and behaviour change efforts to adapt sanitation services to such terrain.
Perched on ridges with dense urban cores, some of these towns already have partial sewer networks. Yet desludging is often informal, handled by small operators. TAPs focus on bringing order — registering operators, ensuring safe practices, introducing basic monitoring such as vehicle tracking and training to improve both safety and service quality.
With flat terrain and large populations, plains towns face service overloads, unregulated operators and scale challenges. TAPs here prioritise structured systems: digital platforms for desludging bookings, procurement of more vehicles, public awareness campaigns and cluster-level STPs to manage higher volumes.
Across altitudes, towns are articulating solutions tailored to context. There is no one-size-fits-all. Instead, a growing willingness to ask: What is feasible, safe and sustainable where I live?
The collective intelligence in these TAPs is a testament to willingness. It signals that towns are ready for a sanitation leap, but they need support to clear the path. Here is what the state must now prioritise:
Standardisation across the board: ULBs know what they want, but formats, costing methods and documentation vary. Agencies should release standard templates for TAPs (with editable activity libraries), surveys, SOPs for desludging and performance dashboards.
Embedded technical handholding: Terms like DPR, coordination and technology reveal gaps where ULBs need expertise. NIUA can provide field cells, engineers and planners who travel across clusters, helping towns finalise designs, contracts and implementation.
Funding Linked to Readiness: ULBs with detailed TAPs, viable costing and inter-departmental coordination should be prioritised for funding. A progressive model, releasing funds against verified milestones, can reward initiative and set replicable examples.
Behaviour and Worker Safety as Non-Negotiable: High demand for IEC and safety shows towns want to clean up not just infrastructure but also perceptions and worker dignity. This opens doors for awareness campaigns, certification programmes and feedback systems, linked with NAMASTE.
Build a Knowledge Loop: Every activity, from PPE drives to site selection, must be documented. A centralised Sanitation Learning Portal for Uttarakhand could become the largest repository of mountain sanitation practices, recording both successes and failures.
National missions must recognise the need for mountain-specific sanitation approaches. With more than 500 sanitation actions now articulated by Uttarakhand’s towns, each shaped by local needs and endorsed by municipal leaders, this exercise can be easily replicated across the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR).
If formats are standardised, journeys documented, and outcomes tracked, the result will be not just Uttarakhand’s progress but a wider repository of terrain-specific solutions for states like Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh.
The TAPs of Uttarakhand are not perfect, but they are honest. They reflect readiness, ambition, and clarity. Scale is not only about budgets and technologies but also about shared templates, peer learning, and repeatable protocols, and that is what Uttarakhand is poised to offer.
If the state backs this momentum with structured support, and if national agencies turn these TAPs into living documents, India will gain both a robust repository of sanitation practices and a tested roadmap for the IHR, a region that has waited too long to be understood on its own terms.
Harshvardhan Nigam is Senior Programme Officer, National Institute of Urban Affairs
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth