CDD exemplifies leadership through innovating, demonstrating and disseminating.

Innovation: CDD pioneered groundbreaking innovations in the WASH domain, especially with its Decentralized Wastewater Management System (DEWATS). The DEWATS approach lends itself to emerging narratives like city-wide inclusive sanitation, water-sensitive urban design, resilient cities, and circular economy.

Demonstration: CDD leads the sector’s growth in developing new solutions by setting up pilots of nature-based treatment systems in diverse geographies, climates, and habitations to demonstrate viable working models. Successful demonstrations help in validating model viability and expand the pool of alternate solutions available to the sector.

Dissemination: Recognizing that sanitation challenges require a collaborative approach which cannot be solved by any single stakeholder, CDD leads the way by forming a consortium of like-minded partner organizations and individuals interested in finding novel solutions. They facilitate sector growth by documenting learnings from their innovations and demonstration work and disseminate the same to a wider audience through knowledge products and training programs.

Aligned with its goal to improve water and sanitation situation on the ground, a key measure of CDD’s impact is the number of treatment systems implemented and the quantity of wastewater or fecal sludge treated, the results of which are improved physical and social health for the communities that are served.

• Implemented over 450 DEWATS, which serve hospitals, universities, schools, residential apartments and collectively treat over 5 billion liters of wastewater annually.
• Helped design over 50 FSTPs (Fecal Sludge Treatment Plants), of which 20 are currently under construction. There are 200 functioning FSTPs across India today, propelled by a DEWATS pilot demonstration.
• Established 10 town-scale FSTPs, which have a larger collective treatment capacity and serve 500,000 people living in these towns. As of 2021, these FSTPs have kept 300,000 liters of fecal sludge from being openly disposed into the environment.

Moreover, CDD has been able to train interested stakeholders in diverse areas about pro-poor sanitation solutions through its consortium. Over the years, CDD has trained over 3,500 professionals – skilled operators, practitioners, municipal engineers, and decision-makers – from 20 different countries, on a whole gamut of WASH-focused topics They have disseminated a significant amount of information around their groundbreaking DEWATS model. Furthermore, over 100 publications are available on CDD’s website.

CDD pioneered the development of a sustainable and cost-effective decentralized wastewater management system called DEWATS, which is both a technology and an approach. DEWATS mimics nature using naturally available micro-organisms in wastewater and plants. DEWATS does not require electricity, chemicals or skilled labor and does not cause odor problems. It is climate-friendly, simple-to-maintain, affordable to operate, and can be contextually customized, be it to a single household, a village, a waterbody, or a city-scale.

CDD’s focus on technology is also unique because knowledge is continuously created and updated through field implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. CDD has helped to implement many non-conventional solutions in the form of treatment plants, business and operating models, thus creating affordable and sustainable solutions that can be accepted and adopted by communities on the ground. These low-cost collaborative innovations present successful alternatives to conventional WASH solutions.

CDD’s technology is fully transferable and scalable. CDD has set up pilots of nature-based treatment systems in diverse geographies, climates, and habitations to demonstrate viable working models. They have successfully implemented wastewater treatment in different rural areas in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh from housing colonies to factories to food processing units. They also intervened to rehabilitate affected colonies by flood at Madapura and Galibeedu (India).

CDD recognizes that their solutions need to be contextualized for space, waste composition, and permitting processes. For example, CDD developed DEWATS Vortex, a spin-off of the original DEWATS, to meet the needs of space-constrained urban clients. In another instance, DEWATS was customized for a museum to tackle the unusually high nitrogen content in the wastewater.

CDD will continue to innovate, demonstrate, and mainstream nature-based solutions, undertake policy advocacy, and help build capacities of other stakeholders engaged in the WASH domain to promote these solutions over the coming years.