Kavita Wankhade is an interdisciplinary urban practitioner, educator, and researcher with over two decades of experience. Trained in the social sciences, urban design, and architecture, her work spans sanitation, water, service delivery, infrastructure, and inclusion.

Her work is grounded in long-term engagement with complex, large-scale, state-led programmes aimed at enabling systemic change. Over the past decade, she has led two of the most ambitious efforts in urban sanitation in India: the Tamil Nadu Urban Sanitation Support Programme (TNUSSP), and the City-Wide Inclusive Sanitation (CWIS) initiative in Tiruchirappalli. These programmes have helped institutionalise inclusive, decentralised service delivery across more than 600 towns in Tamil Nadu, impacting millions of residents. She led a large interdisciplinary team and coordinated multi-actor partnerships. Her contributions ranged from policy and regulatory design to the development of infrastructure and gender integration. These programmes have been recognised nationally and internationally, including awards for inclusion and communication, and have informed practices across geographies.

Grounded in a diverse practice, her writing seeks to inform policy and implementation, contribute to learning, and engage broader conversations on urban transformation. She has also contributed to the design and delivery of interdisciplinary teaching and is committed to shaping learning experiences that emerge from the field.

She is particularly interested in how infrastructure systems can be made more equitable, sustainable, and responsive to workers’ well-being. Her work explores how institutions and actors, across the public, private, and civil society sectors, interact within urban infrastructure systems, and how they can align to strengthen outcomes. She is focused on how large-scale transformation can be achieved in ways that are responsive to context and diversity, and cognisant of structural barriers. She also has an abiding interest in—and long-standing commitment to—India’s small and medium towns.

She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for Development, and is a member of the advisory committees of the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance (SuSanA) and the Initiative for Sanitation Workers.

In her spare time, you’ll find her reading creative non-fiction, doodling and junk journaling, travelling, or immersing herself in the work of Impressionists and collagists.