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• The development objective of the Maharashtra Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project for India is to improve the performance of Maharashtra’s sector institutions in planning, implementation, and monitoring of its rural water supply and sanitation program and to improve access to quality and sustainable services in peri-urban villages, and in water-stressed and water quality-affected areas. This restructuring will bring following changes: (i) add intermediate milestones such as the award of contracts, the commissioning of systems, and the adoption of a metering policy. The disbursement-linked indicators (DLIs) 3 and 4 will thus be split into sub-DLIs, and disbursement-linked results (DLRs) adjusted for semi-annual results; (ii) reduce selected targets of some of the results indicators and simplify definitions of some results indicators, aligning them with the Bank’s core sector indicators, and thus also improving the effectiveness of monitoring and evaluation; and (iii) adjust the program action plans (PAPs) to the current sector, program and institutional context, and avoid repetition of aspects covered in the results framework and DLIs in the PAPs.

• The objective of the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project for low income states for India is to improve piped water supply and sanitation services for selected rural communities in the target states through decentralized delivery systems and to increase the capacity of the participating states to respond promptly and effectively to an eligible crisis or emergency. The project consists of the following components: 1) capacity building and sector development; 2) infrastructure development; 3) project management support; and 4) contingency emergency response. The first component supports the building of institutional capacity for implementing, managing and sustaining project activities. The infrastructure development component supports investments for improving water supply and sanitation coverage, including construction of new infrastructure and rehabilitation and augmentation of existing schemes. The third component includes project management support to the various entities at the national, state, district, and village levels for implementing the project, including staffing, consultancy and equipment costs, and internal and external financial audits. The final component deals with the utilization of resources from unallocated expenditure and allows the Government to request the Bank to re-categorize and reallocate financing from other project components to partially cover emergency response and recovery costs in the event of an emergency or crisis.

• The Punjab Rural Water and Sanitation Sector Improvement Project of India has an objective to improve water and sanitation service levels, reduce open defecation, and strengthen service delivery arrangements in targeted villages in Punjab. The project will have four components with beneficiary villages or households selected using the objective criteria. Component one will provide approximately 570 villages with poor water services and/or partially covered status will be upgraded under Subcomponent 1(a) to receive service standards similar to urban areas (10 hours water supply per day, 100 percent household connections, volumetric charging) thus triggering a transformation in village living conditions. Component two will benefit women and marginalized communities who currently do not have access to water and sanitation (toilet) in the household within existing schemes. Component three will begin to address the water quality problems that are now becoming more apparent rendering Punjab one of the most quality affected states in India. Component four will support non-infrastructure project costs.

• India has been one of the fastest growing economies during the last decade. Between 2004 and 2011, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) expanded at a rate of 8.3 percent per year while poverty declined by an average of 2.5 percentage points per year, a pace significantly faster than earlier periods. Poverty reduction was supported by higher economic growth and greater responsiveness of poverty to growth, including through the expansion of social programs. Increases in non-farm wage employment, especially in construction, greater rural-urban integration, and higher rural wage growth were amongst the key drivers. However, in the more recent period since 2012, a slowdown in rural real wage growth and volatility in construction activity may have had a sobering effect on the pace of poverty reduction. At the same time, acceleration of growth to 7.3 percent in 2015, if sustained, may lead to further gains for the poor. Maintaining the growth momentum, and increasing the responsiveness of poverty reduction to growth, is an India’s key challenge going forward. The overall experience of the past national sanitation programs offer several lessons. First, eliminating OD will not be achieved through a top-down approach of constructing toilets. Instead, it needs to be driven by changing behavior at the community level. This requires complementary ‘soft’ interventions such as interpersonal communication of hygiene messages. Second, the implementation of SBM-G is being conducted by the states, and therefore the role of MDWS is to support states with allocation of funds and incentives for achievement of programs goals and objectives. This role is proposed to be expanded to provide additional capacity building and technical support to the implementing institutions in the states. Third, by recognizing and incentivizing good performance of states and their implementing agencies, especially GPs,

• According to the most recent joint monitoring program report for water and sanitation, sanitation coverage and usage has significantly progressed globally. The use of basic sanitation services has increased steadily between 2000 and 2015. India topped the world ranking in terms of the number of people still practicing open defecation, with almost 40 percent of the population having no access to sanitation facilities. Lack of improved sanitation can have disastrous consequences. The government of India (GoI) has shown strong commitment to improving sanitation, starting with the establishment of the Total sanitation campaign in 1999. This study proposes to shed light on innovative ways of increasing the uptake and usage of safe sanitation practices through a cluster randomized controlled trial designed and implemented in 120 Gram panchayats (GPs) in rural Maharashtra, India. The report is structured as follows. The authors begin by providing details on the context, and a detailed description of the interventions in Section 2. Section 3 outlines the research questions that the evaluation addresses, while Section 4 provides details on the evaluation design, including the power calculations and details on the study sample and data. Thereafter, they present the results in Section 5, starting with the main outcomes toilet uptake, toilet quality and toilet usage, followed by a discussion of observed mechanisms and concluding by targeting results and interactions with SBM(G). Section 6 provides a discussion of the findings and concludes.

• The Government of India, through its swachh Bharat clean India mission has presented a multi-stakeholder initiative focusing on cleaning up 100 places across the country that are iconic due to their heritage, religious, and or cultural significance. The goal of the initiative is to improve the cleanliness conditions of these places to the extent that they can be regarded as swachh tourist destinations. The initiative is being coordinated by the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation in close coordination with other key ministries as well as states, cities, and sites managers. For its first phase, ten iconic sites have been selected to be cleaned up on a learning and demonstration basis. These are: Vaishno Devi (Jammu and Kashmir), Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Maharashtra), Taj Mahal (Uttar Pradesh), Tirupati Temple (Andhra Pradesh), Golden Temple (Punjab), Manikarnika Ghat (Varanasi), Ajmer Sharif Dargah (Rajasthan), Meenakshi Temple (Tamil Nadu), Kamakhya Temple (Assam), Jagannath Puri (Odisha). The actions taken at these initially selected 10 iconic places are expected to provide practical insights and standards to be shared with and further adapted by other iconic places and cities across India. This report details the planned actions discussed during the action planning workshop, held in Delhi on July 8 to 9, 2016, under the initiative, for the iconic site of Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab.