The sanitation crisis is indeed a multi-dimensional problem – a realisation that gets reinforced and becomes more stark as we move through every new phase of the project. And I am not referring only to the behavioural, demand-led challenges in sanitation but to infrastructure development issues and the economics of it all.

Until now the biggest challenge for us was to get the tenders released – a task that required multiple, inter-dependent approvals and processes to be tackled starting with sites, design, sewage, financials, standard operating procedures of the Government, elections so on and so forth. One of the biggest achievements of the project team in the last six months has been the successful release of nearly all the toilets being proposed; 27 Public toilets of Bhubaneswar were released in early December 2013 and 32 community toilets of Cuttack in early Feb 2014. The remaining 60 community toilets of Bhubaneswar are due to go under the hammer any time in the next two weeks.

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In the middle of all the madness that surrounds the release of tenders this month, we have somehow presented Project Sammaan at more forums this last fortnight than we have in the last year. This could be just plain coincidence, or that we are a little more comfortable talking about the hardware phase of the project now that the architectural designs are complete and the tenders are ready to be floated.

Whatever the reason for that may be, one thing it forces you to do is to distill down the project to its most basic parts. So here’s a 10-minute, podium pitch on what Project Sammaan has achieved to date and the key challenges (which have also been written about in a post here):

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As we prepared the latest progress report update for Project Sammaan, some key insights and learnings, and corresponding milestones achieved, emerged that we wanted to share.

While the most tangible outcomes on this project in terms of operational toilets are still a few months away, the progress made in this last reporting period puts the project on a much firmer ground. This has been possible because we were able to streamline internal systems and establish a much better understanding and collaboration between various stakeholders.

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A critical decision facing the consortium at this stage is the quality and timeliness for construction as it gets underway.

For the long term sustainability of the project, it is important that we adopt processes and protocols that are in line with existing government practices. Due to this, the project team has been working towards the tendering route wherein the government puts an open call for bids from potential contractors and selects on the basis of certain pre-determined criteria for the construction phase.

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These are early days still to claim success but we may have finally managed to move the project forward through a small but extremely important milestone – the tendering of public toilets in Bhubaneshwar. The technical sanction and Public Health standing committee approvals are in place and the tender documents await the administrative sanction before they are floated on the e-tendering platform of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation.

Like I said, this is a small but extremely important milestone for the project consortium, and here’s why.

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Challenge 1: Driving innovation within stringent cost benchmarks.

 To work within government frameworks implies that each toilet has to beat the benchmark of under USD 30,000 for a 10 seater toilet. These benchmarks are for standard public and community toilets built by government which are known to be a failure.

Challenge 2: Prototyping at scale.

Within the competing constraints of…

> rigorous evaluation methodology that necessitates a large sample size (100+ toilets) and

 > government accountability of providing basic sanitation to all its citizens …how does one prototype at scale?

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