This paper is an empirical attempt to demonstrate the significance of capacity-building training which was conducted by the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) on behalf of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs under the Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban (SBM-U). The paper focuses on sanitation and solid-waste management (SWM), two issues which are directly under the purview of urban local bodies (ULBs). The objectives of the SBM-U 1.0 are to make all cities and towns open defecation free and garbage free by 2 October 2019. Towards this end, NIUA has conducted training-cum-exposure workshops in 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 for ULBs. These comprise orientation, technical sessions as well as field visits. The pedagogy of these workshops is based on experiential learning theory (ELT), with suitable innovations, employed for educating through first-hand experience. An evaluation of the efficacy of the ELT model was carried out through a research questionnaire filled out by the participants during 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 of selected states and was analysed for the understanding and implementation of service-level processing parameters in their states.