Project Name:
Public Health and WASH
Client:
UNICEF Gandhinagar
Year:
2025
Project Area:
456 sq.km
This research was born from a persistent challenge in urban planning: the disconnect between large-scale infrastructure deployment and tangible public health outcomes in vulnerable communities. We observed that despite investments in water and sanitation, the needle on waterborne diseases often failed to move. In collaboration with UNICEF Gandhinagar, I embarked on an unconventional mission to decode the complex, and critical linkage between water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) infrastructure directly to public health outcomes.
Our core objective, therefore, was to move beyond correlation to causation, developing a data-driven, evidence-based tool that could empower the Urban Local Body (ULB) to make strategic, high-impact investments. Our research journey was a multi-scalar diagnostic, top down approach, city level funneled down to granular ethnographic study. The journey required multiple iterations to develop a study methodology, but the process allowed us to not only identify what the problems were but to elucidate the causal pathways behind them. The result was a decision-support framework, encapsulated by our WASH Matrix, designed to empower Urban Local Bodies in proactive Health investments.
For the spatial analysis at ward-level, I decided to map the epidemiological landscape. By conducting a multi-year spatial analysis of incidence disease data, I identified the persistent geographical epicenters of disease burden. This visualization of high-burden wards transformed abstract health statistics into a clear, geographical imperative for targeted action.
This macro-level analysis directly informed our on ground strategy. We employed a rigorous, top-down funneling methodology to select 13 high-burden slum sites for our deep-dive assessments. This ensured our qualitative insights and household data were gathered from the very communities where the WASH-health nexus was most stressed.
Having identified the 'where,' our next task was to statistically substantiate the 'why.' Deploying a series of bivariate and multi variate analyses like the Chi-square and Kruskal-Wallis H tests, we moved to quantify the strength of these interlinkages. We could now demonstrate with high statistical significance that factors like sewage intrusion (V=0.91) were not peripheral issues but primary drivers of morbidity."
The culmination of our integrated analysis is the WASH Matrix. This is more than a summary; It consolidated gaps across water supply, sanitation systems, environmental hygiene, and behavioral practices. It's our core diagnostic tool that maps the causal pathways of disease. It allows stakeholders to trace a negative health outcome, like childhood diarrhea, back to its multi-faceted roots in intermittent water supply, inadequate sanitation infrastructure, and resultant hygiene behaviors.
The higer level temporal analysis was crucial to reveal a critical and concerning post - covid diseases resurgence hypothesis. The distinct post-2020 resurgence in waterborne disease caseloads, even after normalizing for population, signaled that underlying systemic vulnerabilities were persistent. This data pointed towards a recurring cycle of exposure and illness that routine interventions were failing to break.
