Short Bio
Kavita leads the Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Programme (TNUSSP), a large, public, SDG-6 intervention. TNUSSP delivers decentralised sanitation services to over 10 million people in cities and towns of Tamil Nadu, one of the larger states of India.
The programme is poised to be scaled up over the next three years and will impact 35 million people living across 600 towns. TNUSSP works on multiple fronts - strengthening governance and regulation; enabling social and gender inclusion; design, engineering, and construction; capacity building and behaviour change; and knowledge management.
Kavita also designed and directs the City-Wide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) programme in Trichy, a city with a population exceeding one million. CWIS focuses on ensuring service delivery to all residents.
Kavita has worked as a practitioner, researcher, and educator in urban India for more than 15 years. She is trained in social sciences, urban design, and architecture. The primary focus of her work has been on enabling large-scale systemic transformations by managing and working with diverse stakeholders, including India’s state and city governments, private sector organisations, civil society actors, communities, and development partners.
As Associate Dean, she is building out the School of Systems and Infrastructure. As Head - Practice at IIHS, her role includes expanding and strengthening the practice programme to fulfil IIHS’ commitment to the equitable, sustainable, and efficient transformation of Indian settlements.
Motivation/Commitment to the GSC
My work spans the practice-research-teaching continuum – enabling the creation of knowledge from practice and for practitioners. SuSanA is an important knowledge forum for sanitation. I would be happy to help build it further.
I firmly believe in the need for diversity of voices to shape and influence knowledge. For learning to truly happen, it is not sufficient for knowledge to be produced in Global South, but the frameworks must also evolve from diverse sources. Having worked in South Asia and having had the opportunity to work with grass-root practitioners, informal workers and communities, I hope to strengthen the representation of these voices.
Is there anything else you would like to say to the SuSanA community?
SuSanA is a diverse community that brings together meaningful work done by many organisations globally. With COVID still with us, and climate change upon us, we need to find ways to learn quickly and meaningfully from one another, and I am hoping SuSanA can continue, and strengthen its role in enabling this.
