As any regular reader of this blog will attest, tendering for construction of the Sammaan facilities has been a singular focal point of, and considerable challenge for, Project Sammaan for nearly a year-and-a-half. The hurdles have been well documented, as have the associated peaks and valleys of emotions with each perceived success and setback. It is with this history in mind that we share, with caution, potentially great news that could finally lead to ground-breaking on the first Sammaan facilities.

To provide some background first, the third reissue of the tender (this time split into four individual packages) in Cuttack once again did not yield any interested bidders, let alone qualified ones. In Bhubaneswar, based on the decision to reduce the number of sites for the initial phase of tendering (more…)

The drastically reduced budget for the Community Toilets in Bhubaneswar will only allow us to build only 26 of the originally planned 60 facilities. This meant that the team had to decide which communities would receive a facility and which would be forced to keep their fingers-crossed in hopes that sometime in the future their needs will be met. Doing so was no small task, and one that required the participation of virtually all those working on the initiative. Further complicating matters was the two-week deadline mandated by the government to complete the work.

The first step in this process was visiting all proposed sites to identify any encroachment issues. As the land was identified and allocated to the project nearly 2 years ago, there was serious concern that many of the sites would no longer be open and available for construction. In fact, (more…)

The project team received some very disheartening news in a recent meeting with senior government officials: funding for the Community Toilets in Bhubaneswar has been drastically reduced. This budget cut translates to the construction for 34 of the 60 planned facilities being delayed indefinitely.

The timing of this news was especially difficult for the team as the tender documents for the 60 planned facilities had just been finalized and the release of the notice inviting bids from interested contractors thought to be imminent. Given the 15 months of effort that involved the (more…)

The Project Sammaan communications team has spent the past several weeks making improvements to this website in the interest of increasing the amount of project-related information we’re sharing.

Above and beyond minor aesthetic tweaks such as updating the images used and adding social network connections for the blog’s authors, there are three significant improvements that we felt compelled to call out: a repository of resources and project documents that visitors can download, a map that identifies the locations of every individual facility we intend on building in both Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, and a ‘search’ feature that allows visitors to navigate the site’s content much easier.

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Over the course of the past several weeks, the project management team has launched a bit of a letter-writing campaign to our partners at the municipal corporations, as well as various other senior members of the Odisha state government. The purpose of these formal correspondences is to ensure that the challenges and opinions of the non-government partners working on Project Sammaan are taken into consideration and, more importantly, become part of the permanent record for the initiative.

It can be extremely challenging navigating the bureaucracy of the municipal corporations especially when seeking to ensure that all pertinent information is communicated to all necessary parties in a timely and efficient manner. Emails are ineffective as some of the government partners lack regular access to computers and, further to that point, few have personal email addresses, making it difficult to know if messages sent to generic, catch-all (more…)

Maintaining a website and a as-real-time-as-possible blog for Project Sammaan has been extremely challenging for several reasons. The most basic challenge is simply getting people from the various organizations working on the project to contribute. This is certainly understandable, to a certain degree, considering that many of these people have no background, or even interest, in writing. The problem inherent in this recalcitrance though is the mandate to capture the Project Sammaan experience for inclusion in the end-deliverable of a toolkit that will help guide the efforts of others interested in replicating the project. After all, only you can share your story; no one else can know or adequately capture what your experience has been like.

This is well and truly an ancillary concern though, and one that we’ve taken great strides in addressing through various strategies, whether it be creating questionnaires for people to fill out and then work with me to structure the answers into some cogent and coherent narrative or simply me chasing after and threatening people to get them to contribute. The real issue (more…)

We have written extensively about the challenges that have been faced over the past 2+ years working on Project Sammaan. Whether it’s managing the efforts and interests of multiple stakeholders, revising architectural drawings based on ground realities, navigating the complexities of working with urban local bodies in India, or “simply” keeping the initiative within its budget, the hurdles have been many, and significant.

One additional challenge that we’ve been remiss in discussing, though, involves accounting for the different working styles and protocols of the partners based in the pilot cities and those based elsewhere. As one of the only foreigners working on the project, and in the Indian context for the first time, adjusting to different working styles was a given. However, I was largely unprepared for just how divergent, even seemingly antithetical, the office dynamics can be from one city to the next.

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It has been nearly 4 months since I took over as project manager of Sammaan. The timing of this threw me head first into the hardware tendering process and this milestone has dominated a majority of my time until now, as we prepare for the release of the final pending tenders: the 60 community toilets in Bhubaneswar. This milestone should be achieved by the end of February if all goes as it is currently planned.

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The Sammaan team ended the first month of 2014 by achieving another significant milestone: the tender for the 32 Community Toilets in Cuttack has been released! This ends a nearly year-long process that was fraught with various hurdles, but one that was also rich in learnings that will enrich the project’s toolkit and, hopefully, help other organizations working in the field avoid the same missteps and challenges that we encountered.

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The tender process has been long, tedious, and frustrating, but has also provided incredible insights into working with the government in implementing a project as unique and with such a scale as Sammaan, and the end is in sight. Much has been written about the tender in both this monthly newsletter and the project blog, but it is certainly a milestone worthy of such attention.

The feelings of elation shared by many partners following the tender release of the Public Toilets in Bhubaneswar were short-lived as the focus shifted to the Community Toilets, particularly the sites in Cuttack. Unlike the process that brought about the PT tender release in Bhubaneswar and is being followed for the Community Toilets there, in which the facilities are split into separate batches with total costs below the 3 crore threshold that permits the city municipalities to provide technical sanction and, therefore, release the tender, the total tender package of 32 facilities for nearly 8 crore needs to be released in Cuttack.

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