Zachary Burt

Athena Infonomics

Water sector reforms have assumed importance with water crisis becoming acute and drastically affecting availability to domestic, agriculture and industrial sectors. Inefficiencies observed in the distribution and management of drinking water backed up by inability of public sector to make huge investments has attracted private participation. User...

Safely managed waste reuse may be a sustainable way to protect human health and livelihoods in agrarian-based countries without adequate sewerage. The safe recovery and reuse of fecal sludge-derived fertilizer (FSF) has become an important policy discussion in low-income economies as a way to manage urban sanitation to benefit peri-urban agricultur...

Kigali, Rwanda lacks a centralized sewer system, which leaves residents to choose between on-site options; the majority of residents in informal settlements use pit latrines as their primary form of sanitation. When their pits fill, the pits are either sealed, or emptied; emptying is often done by hand and then dumped in the environment, putting th...

Sanitation research focuses primarily on containing human waste and preventing disease; thus, it has traditionally been dominated by the fields of environmental engineering and public health. Over the past 20 years, however, the field has grown broader in scope and deeper in complexity, spanning diverse disciplinary perspectives. In this article, w...

Intermittent piped water supply is common throughout urban India, but continuous, fully pressurized supply (“24x7 water”) is the Government of India service norm. We compare eight wards with intermittent water supply and eight wards that were upgraded to continuous supply in a demonstration project in Hubli-Dharwad, Karnataka. We employed a matched...

Public access to full text: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1WyNr_,iVXJtlo Urban service provision falls somewhere on the continuum of lower-cost, lower-quality, unreliable and intermittent to higher-cost, higher-quality, reliable and continuous. Piped water services in India are generally in the former category, but efforts are underway in some ci...

This discussion paper reviews the extensive literature on sanitation to show that inadequate access to this basic service prevents the realization of a range of human rights and of gender equality. We recognize that “dignity” is a highly culture- and gender-specific term; we therefore argue that sanitation for all—sanitation that serves all genders...

Well into the 21st century, safe and affordable drinking water remains an unmet human need. At least 1.8 billion people are potentially exposed to microbial contamination, and close to 140 million people are potentially exposed to unsafe levels of arsenic. Many new technologies, water quality assessments, health impact assessments, cost studies, an...

Intermittent delivery of piped water can lead to waterborne illness through contamination in the pipelines or during household storage, use of unsafe water sources during intermittencies, and limited water availability for hygiene. We assessed the association between continuous versus intermittent water supply and waterborne diseases, child mortali...

In the year 2008, the Karnataka Urban Water Sector (KUWS) Improvement Project brought continuous water service (CWS) to a demonstration zone in the twin cities of Hubli-Dharwad, India. Scale-up of CWS for the rest of the city has been authorized and the initial stages of construction are currently in progress. We compared the historical consumption...

Urban water systems in Asia and Africa mostly provide intermittent rather than continuous water supplies; such systems compromise water quality and inconvenience the user. Starting in 2008, an upgrade to continuous (24/7) water services was provided for 10% of the twin cities of Hubli-Dharwad, India, through a process of privatisation and formalisa...

While efforts are underway to expand latrine coverage to an estimated 2.6 billion people who lack access to improved sanitation, there is evidence that actual use of latrines is suboptimal, limiting the potential health and environmental gains from containment of human excreta. We developed a passive latrine use monitor (PLUM) and compared its abil...

Haath Mein Sehat (HMS) is a student-led project bridging students from the US and India to improve health through community-based hygiene education and provision of safe water through point-of-use treatment in slums in Mumbai and Hubli, India. The activities of the organization directly link research to development practice. HMS has a volunteer-led...