May was yet another very busy month for the communications team, with blog activity crescendoing, the Vox Populi video completed, work continuing on the Technical & Design Guidelines document, and, most importantly, Project Sammaan being added to SuSanA, the online sustainable sanitation alliance forum.

As the overall project activities continue increasing, the blog has seen an influx in participation from all partners. Abstract posts about the state of sanitation in India joined those on public relations, branding, project management, and community census activities, making the month of May one of the most diverse in terms of features. These posts present a good snapshot of the wide range of touch-points for Project Sammaan and reinforce its uniqueness in the sanitation sector.

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The mandate to document and share Project Sammaan developments and learnings manifests itself in many ways, and April’s activities are a prime example of this, with a video being produced, a media kit developed, blog posts being added to the website, and, most significantly, formal project reports for the municipal corporations drafted.

Members of the Quicksand and CFAR teams visited slums in Bhubaneswar at the beginning of the month to interview community members for a “voice of the people” video. Additionally, CFAR transcribed the video clips into the Odiya font, allowing their comments to be conveyed exactly as they were said.

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On a recent trip to Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, members of the Project Sammaan team from Quicksand and CFAR visited slums with the intention of recording a series of interviews with community members. These conversations are part of an initiative to build off of the user-experience theme that governed Potty Project in the past and guides Project Sammaan both today and going forward.

Whereas previous visits to these communities and interactions with those living within them were focused around gaining insights that will help drive specific aspects of Project Sammaan, these visits were intentionally devoid of such parameters. These conversations were intended to afford people a platform in which they could share thoughts and opinions on their daily lives, their communities, and their aspirations for the future.

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The construction vendors are identified through an exhaustive tendering process managed by Feedback Foundation. The tendering process is administered by the local governments and it is supported by the project team. It is important for the project team to understand the documents that need to be submitted along with the approvals required so that the process is completed within project’s timeline.

Feedback Foundation interfaced with the BMC engineering team to obtain more details on the tendering process and to review the tender documents that had already been prepared. They also collaborated with Anagram Architects on incorporating the facility design changes suggested by the engineering team. These efforts help to ensure that the process is completed in a timely manner with all requisite approvals in place.

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Operations & Maintenance (O&M) is one of the four pillars of innovation, primarily due to the fact that shortcomings and failures within this largely determines the success of the facilities.

Given the importance of this workstream, a great deal of time and effort has gone into understanding the current models that are employed, while exploring practical changes that can be made to operating and maintaining these facilities while improving the quality of life of the caretakers themselves, both through their perceived value and position within the communities they serve and by addressing unfair business practices that put an undue financial strain on them.

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For a large infrastructure project of this nature, multiple stakeholders are a given. Within this dynamic there is an overall project objective, but also individual organizational goals that need to be taken into consideration and addressed. At times, these individual mandates can conflict with the project’s overall goals with one team’s workstream impacted by the needs of another’s.

An example of this can be found in the innovation and design mandates. Imperative for some of the partners, these directives require considerable and conscientious ideation. This alone can be seen by stakeholders with limited understanding of the complexities and intricacies of design innovation as a delay.

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Sewage management systems are a necessary part of the sanitation puzzle and potentially a big failure point from a public health perspective. From a government perspective, scale of solution is an imperative. Existing statutes and cost constraints make it extremely difficult to experiment with new, untested technologies.

As such, waste management is a key component to Project Sammaan as shortcomings in this have frequently been the cause of failures in other facilities and improper storage and disposal of waste could lead to worsening present conditions and not improving them.

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Project Sammaan’s long-term goal is to create a replicable, successful sanitation model that can be adapted by cities throughout South Asia and beyond.

In order to quantify the impact of this initiative, rigorous evaluation needs to occur. However, the methodology of this assessment requires a considerable sample size, meaning that the interventions, irrespective of their success rates, will be rolled out on a massive scale. It’s not merely one or two facilities, but well over 100 in dozens of communities; a considerable footprint to be certain.

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Project Sammaan’s initial pilot phase in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack involves the construction of 100+ separate community and public sanitation facilities. Some of these facilities will replace existing, non-functional toilet blocks on the land these failed facilities currently occupy, whereas others will be built on new land allocated by the municipal corporations for use in the project.

Irrespective of this, every site requires vetting to ensure it complies not only with building codes but also within parameters set by the project itself. In order to arrive at the final list of sites, nearly twice as many proposed areas as will be built on needed to be documented and evaluated.

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Potty Project provided a great deal of detail regarding issues around design that, if improved, could facilitate greater adoption rates of facilities by the communities they serve, and, consequently, reduce instances of open-defecation in these areas.

There will be two broad facility types:

1. Base Layer: facilities that will include only toilet stalls, menstrual waste incinerators, and handwashing stations.

2. Enhanced Layer: In addition to the base layer features, these facilities will also have bathing stalls, clothes-washing stations, and retail spaces.

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