by Why Sanitation awareness matters as much as infrastructure?
World Toilet Day 2025 invites us to consider “sanitation in a changing world”. Climate change, unplanned construction, ageing infrastructure, and population growth are putting new pressures on sanitation systems worldwide, especially in hilly areas, where natural slopes often serve as informal extensions of waste systems. These pressures reveal something essential: sanitation is not just about toilets. It is about how water moves, how settlements grow, how waste is handled, and how communities understand the systems they rely on.
Earlier this month, I met my friend’s mother, who had returned from Kullu, Himachal Pradesh, after visiting her ancestral home. During our conversation, I asked whether the recent monsoon floods had affected their area. She described how many houses had been buried under stone and mud due to landslides. But what she said next stayed with me. After the landslides, people noticed household waste pipelines and sewerage leaching into the hillsides. She believed this may have contributed to weakening the mountain.
Her observation, rooted in lived experience and common sense, pointed to something my colleagues at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and I have also been studying: the critical need to understand sanitation systemsas integrated, interdependent, and relational. Unprecedented rains and landslides in the Himalayas stem from a mix of climate change, unregulated and relentless construction, and tourism-driven growth. Her account highlights another dimension: the importance of sanitation planning in the hills that is sensitive to local geographical and ecological conditions.
This World Toilet Day, I write about one specific theme: the need for deeper awareness of how the components of sanitation systems are interconnected. This knowledge exists, but it is not yet central in how we think, plan, or communicate about sanitation. It must be consciously cultivated among residents, practitioners, and urban local bodies.
Between 2020 and 2023, as part of an international collaborative research project- TOSSIB, colleagues at TISS, the University of Manchester, Universities in Brazil, the Centre for Promoting Democracy, and I studied questions of access, knowledge, hygiene, and perceptions of sanitation, including water, toilets, sewerage, and solid waste. In India, the research was conducted in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai to understand sanitation systems in relation to the planning histories of these cities: one incrementally developed, the other planned. We surveyed residents living across a range of housing typologies.
One survey component asked residents where their water comes from and where their wastewater goes. Among the 350 respondents, the majority knew only the most immediate source (tap, standpost, well) and the immediate outlet (drain outside or septic tank beneath their house). This limited awareness is significant. In rapidly urbanising contexts, people become detached from the environmental realities behind their water and waste.
Linking back to the Kullu example, this detachment becomes even more consequential in geographies under climate stress, where untreated wastewater doesn’t just pollute, it can exacerbate soil instability and compound the impacts of extreme weather.
Of course, access remains a central concern. Millions in India still lack safe sanitation, which makes achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6 an urgent priority. Since 2014, the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) has prioritised behavioural change and solid waste management, while Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) has focused on creating core sanitation infrastructure. Yet gaps persist, particularly in the safe management and treatment of sewerage, with untreated waste continuing to leach into soil and flow into water bodies.
This is where awareness becomes as important as infrastructure. Regulation and monitoring matter, and so does building treatment facilities. But without public understanding of how sanitation systems function: how water moves, how waste is carried, and where it ends up, the ecological and structural consequences of untreated water remain largely invisible.
In the hills, for instance, untreated wastewater can weaken soil integrity, making slopes more vulnerable during heavy rainfall. For state governments facing repeated climate shocks, integrating sanitation systems awareness into planning and community engagement should be a core priority.
As the world changes, through climate variability, shifting settlement patterns, and strained infrastructure, the pathways through which water and waste travel are now central to how we think about risk and resilience. They directly shape environmental risk, public health, and the stability of communities. Untreated wastewater is not just a pollution issue; it can destabilise ecosystems, weaken land, and amplify the severity of extreme climate events. Those most affected are often the poorest and the most marginalized, who live in high-risk areas with limited access to sanitation and infrastructure, making them disproportionately vulnerable to climate shocks.
In today’s rapidly changing conditions, the question of “where our waste goes” is no longer invisible nor inconsequential. To protect the health and dignity of people, especially the most vulnerable, we need sanitation systems that are resilient, locally adaptable, and supported by informed citizens.
This World Toilet Day is a reminder that future-ready sanitation requires more than infrastructure; it requires awareness, accountability, and a recognition that sanitation is a shared ecological responsibility.
