Water and sanitation facilities among low income household in three cities of India

Providing basic health facilities especially to the socio-economically disadvantaged section of the society is a great challenge for large country like India. The country's health care programme is rural focused as about 70% of the population live in rural areas. But the country is urbanizing rapidly and the total size of the urban population is about 377 million(census 2011) out of which a significant proportion of population live in slums. The 2001 census shows that there was a total of 42.6 million slum population living in 8.2 million households which constitutes 15% of the total urban population. About half of the population in Mumbai and about a third of the population in Kolkata live in slums. Increasing slum population is an indication of urban poverty and declining urban quality of life. Most of the slum dwellers do not have access to basic health and sanitation facilities resulting in poor health conditions. The present study makes an attempt in understanding the water and sanitation facilities among the slum and non-slum households in three cities(Pune, Jaipur and Bhubaneswar) of India by using the data collected in a household survey covering approximately 2200 households in each city.