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The Government of India has set a rather ambitious goal of eliminating open defecation by 2019. For urban areas, this implies providing toilets to about 22 million households. This column contends that it is possible to achieve this goal if the limited public funds are leveraged to facilitate innovative financing mechanisms, through a demand-led scheme for toilets.

There is an increasing recognition of the importance of sanitation by the new government. The famous “pehle shauchalay, fir devalaya”(toilets first, temples later) quote from the Prime Minister has now been captured in the new Swachh Bharat Mission for Urban Areas (SBMUA) 1. The key goal of the mission is to eliminate open defecation over the next five years (Press Information Bureau, Government of India 2014). We recognise that ‘swachh bharat’in the urban context is not just about toilets; it encompasses the full service chain of sanitation including collection/storage, transport, treatment and disposal/reuse of human waste, waste water and solid waste. However, in this column, we focus our discussions on toilet provision. We argue that there is a latent demand for ‘own’toilets 2 in urban areas and this demand can be unlocked by supplementing public resources with innovative financing.