Building Momentum

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.

It’s small because, strictly speaking, public toilets fall outside the purview of randomised control trials which is one of the major outcomes of the project. In lay terms, it means that the eventual impact of public toilets on public health through mitigation of open-defecation will not be measured. From a purely developmental perspective, this may seem odd because it suffers the fate of most development projects where the impact is either not measured or, if measured, done so inaccurately. But from a project perspective, this was unavoidable because the first and foremost challenge that Project Sammaan seeks to address is the failure of community toilets located within low income residential communities. The investment in research, being limited, was therefore prioritised for community toilets over public toilets.

Regardless, the successful tendering of Public Toilets is an extremely important milestone and, at the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, something all of us at Project Sammaan should be proud of.

The reasons for it are the following:

Successful test run of complex multi-stakeholder negotiations and processes

The design of public toilets coming through marks a successful collaboration between multiple partners from fields of architecture, engineering, design, economics, research and management. While its still too early to say if the toilets by themselves are “successful”, this phase lays a solid foundation where each consortium member is aware of each other’s strengths and limitations. We also now have first-hand knowledge of the challenges that we must collectively overcome if we have to deliver this project while adhering to the strict quality and efficiency benchmarks that we must hold ourselves accountable to.

Truly innovative toilet model is months away from deployment

To my knowledge, the hardware designs being used in public toilets in Bhubaneshwar are the first time certain innovations are being attempted by a city corporation and the prospect of seeing them deployed in a few months is exciting. The innovations range from simple construction guidelines that ensure easier cleaning and maintenance to certain features such as menstrual waste incinerators that are being tried out at such a scale for the first time.

Established a working relationship between Project Sammaan and the city governments that is based on mutual trust and respect

The design and planning of public toilets went through several phases where the working relationship between Project Sammaan and the city governments was tested. As we went through the design phase, it became evident that to gain the government’s confidence the team would need to work within the constraints of the established legal and administrative frameworks – often inimical to the design process which banks on being highly iterative and conversational. The government on the other hand took time to warm up to a process that relied on frequent check-ins, and often their guidance on how to navigate bureaucratic bottlenecks that could potentially derail the project. As the public toilet design moves into the tendering phase, we feel reasonably confident of having a partner in the government administration that is equally excited and eager to see the results.

 

Notwithstanding the time it has taken to get this far, as we step into the design of community toilets, it seems like the team is surer, more confident in its own abilities to design and deliver sanitation services to the people of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack – and that in my opinion is a valuable asset that we must cherish and celebrate, even if in a small way.