Beneath the surface: How Uttarakhand’s towns are digging deep to transform sanitation

On a crisp morning in Gopeshwar Nagar Palika, a town in the Garhwal hills, in Chamoli district, a group of municipal officials gathered in a quiet conference hall, notebooks open and calculators ready. At the front, a newly appointed executive officer carefully walked through the sludge volume calculation for his town, estimating how much waste accumulates, how often it needs to be emptied, and what kind of systems would be required to manage it. It was a modest exercise, but one that carried weight. For the first time, many participants were looking at sanitation not as an afterthought, but as a system: measurable, manageable, and directly connected with public health. Outside, the town moved at its usual pace. Inside, a different kind of momentum was building.

This wasn’t just a workshop. It was a point of no return.

The quiet crisis below our feet

In most Indian towns, sanitation is a silent issue. It is seen only when it overflows or stinks. In Uttarakhand, settlements are snugly nestled in the mountainsides and sparsely populated. The state runs 67 sewage treatment plants (STPs) and is planning to double its operational capacity in the coming years. But most towns rely on septic tanks and pit latrines. Out of sight and out of mind, they collect years of human waste in silence. Until they don’t.

Without scheduled desludging, scientific disposal, or reliable service providers, many of these containment units have the potential to cause environmental and health hazards. They leach into water sources, overflow during rains, or are emptied illegally into rivers. The environmental and health costs are invisible but immense. But the solution doesn’t lie in billion-rupee infrastructure alone. It starts with something quieter and closer to the ground, i.e. understanding, calculations and a sense of ownership.

A mission to transform, one town at a time

Earlier this year, at the behest of the Director of Urban Development Directorate (UDD), the Sanitation Capacity Building Platform (SCBP) at NIUA, with support from the Uttarakhand Urban Development Directorate, embarked on an ambitious mission: to operationalise the State Septage Management Protocol and used water management across all Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) in the state. This meant hitting the road, conducting in-person workshops district by district, and sitting down with the very people responsible for implementing sustainable sanitation: the executive officers, junior engineers, sanitary inspectors, environmental supervisors and more.

We weren’t just armed with PowerPoints alone; we brought with us whiteboards, calculation worksheets, fee estimation tools, and perhaps most important thing of them all, time to listen.

The workshops: A pedagogy of participation

Each workshop followed a deliberately designed participatory format. After the icebreakers, the trainers from NIUA dove straight into the fundamentals of breaking down the sanitation service chain into containment, emptying, transport, treatment, recycling and reuse. Using real-time town data, participants estimated the amount of sludge (where a sewage network is not present) their town produces. Then came the twist: they calculated how many desludging vehicles they’d need, and at what frequency, to manage that load sustainably.

There were moments of revelation.

“I always thought one vehicle was enough,” an officer from Kashipur admitted after realising his town required four to meet the demand. “No wonder we keep getting complaints.” In another session, we introduced a web-based Desludging Fee Calculator, developed to tackle the opaque and inconsistent pricing that plagues desludging services. Each ULB was given a login. They plugged in distances, vehicle capacities, frequency, etc., and emerged with fee estimates that were transparent, rational, and defensible. The mathematics was glorious.

This pedagogical approach activated the dormant student in the officers and brought forth competitiveness among the participants that was thought to be forgotten.

Stories from the field

Across the 13 districts, in towns large and small, we encountered a common thread: enthusiasm from the newly recruited executive officers. Many of them were young, energetic, and hungry to leave a mark. The workshops became their first deep dive into used water management (UWM) and faecal sludge and septage management (FSSM), a sector often neglected in urban governance.

“I came in thinking this would be a technical seminar,” said one officer from Tehri. “But it felt more like a boot camp in civic responsibility.”

Group activities brought local knowledge to the front. Some towns shared that they had informal contracts with private desludging operators. Others confessed they hadn’t mapped their septic tanks. One particularly engaged participant from Rudrapur described how his ULB was trying to create a WhatsApp-based booking system for desludging.

By the time the sessions ended, ideas were flying. The room, which is generally silent and subdued at the start of the day, bustled with discussions and energy.

Drafting the future: One action plan at a time

But the real breakthrough came at the end of each workshop. In addition to the trainings, we asked towns to act. Every ULB was given a template to draft a one-year used water and FSSM action plan. Using everything they’d learned: population estimates, sludge generation figures, available infrastructure, and behavioural gaps, they crafted 12-month strategies. But they didn’t do this for a certificate or a nod from higher officials. They did it because, for the first time, they saw how sanitation connects directly to public health, environmental safety, and municipal credibility.

By the end of our workshop series, we had received 98 unique, locally contextualised action plans from individual ULBs, each a roadmap born not from consultants but from civil servants on the ground.

It’s hard to overstate what that means. These inputs from the grassroot level are akin to sitting on a gold mine.

What the numbers say and what they don’t

In many districts, towns reported challenges that were more structural than technical. No treatment facilities within feasible transport range. Lack of designated funds for the implementation of treatment systems. Residents are unwilling to pay for a service they’ve never been taught to value. In some cases, desludging trucks had to traverse steep, narrow roads that no vehicle manufacturer had imagined. Unavailability of land was another menace. Still, the tone wasn’t defeatist. It was positive and beaming with rigour to do something. As one officer from Pithoragarh put it, “We may not have everything, but we can start with what we know and what we have learned.”

Reflections and the road ahead

One recurring feedback was the need for follow-up sessions. Many ULBs asked for deeper dives into information, education and communication strategies, co-treatment models, and cost recovery systems. Others suggested including field visits to operational treatment plants.

One takeaway was clear: people on the ground are ready to engage. They just need clarity, support, and a little nudge to get started. What started as a state mandate evolved into a movement of municipal introspection. Across hills and plains, officials have started seeing sanitation as one of their core mandates.

The last workshop ended quietly. As the room emptied, an officer lingered near the board, flipping through her notes. She asked, “Do you think people will notice if we get this right?”

She wasn’t talking about the praise. She meant the silence that follows when the drains don’t overflow. When septic tanks are emptied on time. When families don’t fall sick from invisible pathogens. When sanitation becomes so routine, it disappears.

That’s the hope.

And maybe that’s the true measure of success: not applause, but absence. Not headlines, but health. Uttarakhand has taken a bold step. And somewhere in its winding streets and quiet homes, the groundwork is being laid, not just for cleaner towns, but for a robust public service. One that starts, quite literally, from the ground up.

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