The politics of visibility in urban sanitation : bureaucratic coordination and the Swachh Bharat Mission in Tamil Nadu, India

Often linked with class and caste and mired in socio-cultural taboos, sanitation has a reputation problem in India. The introduction of the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) aims to address these challenges not only at the individual level, but also at the organizational level. SBM heavily banks on the use of reputational devices such as social media campaigns and city rankings to incentivize the sub-national implementation of reforms. While literatures on sanitation implementation highlight coordination between agencies and between agencies and NGOs as key to service improvements, few if any, explore how organizational reputation may affect that coordination. Given the importance afforded to SBM within India's current march toward sanitation reform, this scholarly lacuna is surprising. My dissertation aims to address this knowledge gap through an in-depth study of coordination, and the role of organizational reputation in the roll-out of SBM in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Raman, Prassanna.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gabriella Y. Carolini.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127608

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127608