First School of Water and Waste- Managing Water & Sanitation

The School will be the first of its kind in India, and will offer inter-disciplinary, trans-national, practice-based courses. This approach will make participants question the excessive focus on technical aspects such as engineering, finance, planning and politics which affect the management of water and sanitation.

Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) will soon be launching the first of its six modern residential training schools under its newly established facility, the Anil Agarwal Environment Training Institute (AAETI). The School of Water and Waste is being designed as a one-of-its-kind capacity-building hub for urban water and sanitation for India and the Global South. Questioning of fundamental assumptions will help in bridging the gap between what a community might want and what the planners think they need.

A two-day planning meeting, involving experts from India and other countries, was held on May 21-22, 2018 in CSE’s AAETI campus in Nimli (Rajasthan). The meeting deliberated on conceptualizing the School, and its courses, curricula and faculty. The meeting also focused on identifying knowledge and skill gaps in the area of city-wide water and sanitation management.

Speaking at the meeting, Sunita Narain, Director General, CSE, said: “Our existing ways and methods of managing water and waste have severe problems – they are capital- and natural resource-intensive, and create and maintain a divide between the rich and the poor. Our cities must reinvent and rework the methods and technologies of conveying water and disposing waste. We are hopeful that the School of Water and Waste at AAETI will show the way.”

“An effective, sustainable urban water management process involves preserving ecological integrity of water-supply systems, wasting less water, allowing fair access to supply systems and giving people a say in how water resources are to be developed and used,” said Suresh Rohilla, Programme Director, Urban Water Programme, CSE, at the meeting.

The School will include a unique referral laboratory on septage management, which will test different tools, approaches and efficiencies of various decentralized wastewater management systems.

The Anil Agarwal Environment Training Institute, a full-fledged residential training and research campus developed by CSE in Nimli, near Alwar, in Rajasthan, became operational this year. The facility will house six premier centers of learning – its Schools – and concentrate on building capacity of regulators, environmental managers, activists and communicators on issues of environment and development.