Municipal services and infrastructure—water, sewerage, drains, solid waste, roads, electricity, and telecommunications—are essential to developing and maintaining efficient, healthy, and sustainable cities. These critical services, plus other physical and social amenities, including housing, schools, and health care, make cities livable and allow their residents to be productive citizens. This guidebook shows the various processes, components, and skills required to develop essential municipal services and infrastructure. Both Indian and global experience demonstrate that governance, finance, and planning set the stage for good implementation.They are preconditions to physical construction, and are the focus of this guidebook.

The guidebook’s goal is to provide infrastructure project implementers and policy makers with assistance in developing sustainable and inclusive urban infrastructure services, with a focus on water, sanitation, and solid waste management. The process has been developed and refined during the 17 years of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-sponsored Financial Institutions Reform and Expansion Program—Debt & Infrastructure, known as the FIRE (D) Program, which has been responding to the many challenges associated with rapid urbanization in India. Urbanization will continue to be a distinguishing characteristic of India’s development path for many decades to come.

This guidebook is the result of a long and successful collaboration between the Government of India and the Government of the United States of America that began with the economic and political reform movement of the early 1990s and has been responsible, in part, for transforming the country and setting it on a new global path of growth and development.

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City Partners International will carry on the legacy

City Partners International (CPI) is a non-profit organization that is developing partnerships in India and globally to continue the work of the FIRE (D) Program, as USAID funding comes to an end in 2011. CPI raises grants and impact investments to apply market-based strategies that help achieve resilient cities with healthy citizens and productive workers.

The Infrastructure Development Finance Company Limited (IDFC) has already partnered with CPI to form the FIRE (D) Foundation to help carry on this legacy in India.

The mission of the FIRE (D) Program is to institutionalize the delivery of commercially viable urban infrastructure and services at the local, state, and national levels. From 1994 to 2011, the FIRE (D) Program worked to support the development of demonstration projects and of a sustainable urban infrastructure finance system. Other priority areas include:

Expansion of the roles of the private sector, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and community-based organizations (CBOs) in the development, delivery, operation, and maintenance of urban infrastructure, with particular focus on involving and providing services to the poor

Increased efficiency in the operation and maintenance of existing water supply and sewerage systems

Strengthened financial management systems at the local level

Development of legal and regulatory frameworks at the state level

Continued implementation of the 74th Constitution Amendment Act (1992)

Capacity building through the development of an urban management training network