Government Maharashtra has taken up an initiative to reform selected rural villages affected by natural calamities like drought and other social, economic, livelihood and infrastructural challenges. This initiative has been started by recruiting Fellows in each GP for preparing village development plan, promotion of community participation and effective execution of the schemes according to the plan.

SIGMA Foundation in collaboration with UNICEF Maharashtra Field Office has taken up a 12-month long concurrent monitoring, as a third party, for understanding the ground reality of the progress made in the WASH sector in the VSTF villages across Chandrapur, Gadchiroli, Jalna, Nandurbar, Osmanabad, Pune, Raigad and Washim districts. This report is the outcome of the process to reflect progress of WASH related performance in some of the VSTF villages for which data was collected during July to December 2016 across six districts. Each district had been visited once in two months and every district was visited thrice in six months. A total of 21 villages had been visited and primary data was collected through survey of 10 to 15 households, on an average, from each village, selected at random. There were also interactions with the functionaries of the GPs, CMRD Fellows and village level institutions like Schools, AWCs and the Health Care Facilities (HCFs). The team of SIGMA Foundation has covered 226 households, 19 AWCs, 18 schools, 7 HCFs across 21 villages of 15 GPs during the survey. The report brings out the qualitative aspects of WASH in the villages as well as the nature of interventions being made, successes achieved and the problems being faced to guide policymaking and planning future interventions.