Defining Sammaan

Sammaan is the Hindi, Bengali and Odiya term for honor, respect, and dignity. We at Quicksand felt it the perfect name for the sanitation project we are undertaking that seeks to rethink the current model of sanitation facilities in urban slums and design a new structure that instills a sense of pride, dignity and respect.

The project will begin in slum communities in two cities in Eastern India – Bhubaneswar and Cuttack – and hopefully expand across the rest of the country.

Project Sammaan was born out of the research Quicksand undertook as part of the Potty Project, an in-depth design research study focused on understanding three things:

1. The end-user experience at community toilet facilities within urban slums in India
2. End-user perceptions, attitudes, and mental models around sanitation and hygiene
3. The “supply side” aspects of community sanitation in slums including things such as pricing, operations & maintenance, caretaking, and business models.

This extended design research study was important because there are multiple problems (e.g., social, cultural, architectural, economic, etc.) that plague sanitation in urban slums.

For instance, in many cases people simply lack access to adequate facilities. (In fact, there are now more mobile phones in India than there are toilets.) In other cases, the toilet facilities themselves are in such states of disrepair and uncleanliness that they’re nearly impossible to use.

It was felt that a human-centered research could provide valuable counterpoint to the largely engineering-heavy or social engineering heavy efforts (e.g., Community-led Total Sanitation) that the sanitation sector primarily relied on.

Potty Project identified innovation opportunities in four buckets: architectural design, communication design, business models, and operations and maintenance.

These opportunities were the starting point for Project Sammaan and the improved sanitation facilities that it seeks to design and construct.

One key point to keep in mind is that the sanitation facilities designed under Project Sammaan are not merely toilets. The notion that toilets are all that are needed to improve the sanitation situation is unsound. It fails to take into consideration the other sanitation activities that these communities engage in at their lives: clothes washing, bathing, disposal of menstrual waste, as well as urination and defecation.

The proposed facilities will act as one-stop shops for all these sanitation activities leading to greater adoption. This presents unique challenges but also opportunities. Despite the inherent level of importance of these facilities, the overarching perception of them as “places of filth”, coupled with limited access to basic resources like water and adequate waste disposal, leads many of these facilities to degrade.

Their continued use despite this degradation only compounds the issue, making matters far worse and leading many residents to seek out other places for their sanitation needs.

Frequently this means using alternative water sources (e.g., rivers and streams, public water taps) for their clothes-washing and bathing needs and open urination and defecation in public spaces, often in nearby fields and even in street drains.

This open defecation practice is of particular concern due to the potential for spreading disease and other contagion in the frequently overcrowded communities.

Other factors contribute to the misuse, or lack of use, with the existing facilities as well. Topics such as physical location, age, gender and physical abilities of the users, the rationale behind not building toilets in their homes, as well as the role of the facilities’ caretakers all play critical roles in re-envisioning the current model to better serve these communities.

These are but a few of the issues and considerations that the Potty Project research introduced to us.

Through generous funding from private organizations and active participation from the Indian government (particularly the municipalities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack), we were able to shift that research into another phase: the implementation phase, which is Project Sammaan.

Additional partners in the project are J-PAL, CFAR, Feedback Foundation, Anagram Architects, and Studio Miscellanea.

After careful consideration, the communities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack have been selected as pilot locations. In the coming months we will work with these communities to construct 119 sanitation facilities, testing out various designs along the way to determine which provides the best services.

We will work with partners to develop the facilities and then J-PAL, our partner organization, will track their impact in each community over the course of the next few years.

Once that data has been collated and we have the qualitative and quantitative data to provide further direction, a Project Sammaan toolkit will be prepared to enable the replication of these improved sanitation facilities in other suitable cities.

Quicksand relies on the individual user experience as the starting point for any innovation effort. Over the course of this project, we’ve met incredible, resilient people and have been touched by the grace in which they lead their lives. For us, Sammaan has become far more than just the project’s name; it has become the driving force in all our efforts.

It’s easy to get lost in the numbers when they are so large and to lose sight of who exactly these people are. After all, a staggering near 1 in 7 people on Earth live in slum conditions.

Our hope is that through the Project Sammaan blog and social media efforts we will be able to put a human face on this project and give that face a voice, if even a small one.

A great deal of time and effort has gone into getting us to this point, but we are still very much at the beginning of Project Sammaan. There’s still very much to learn and a long road ahead of us.

We invite you to join us on this journey and encourage your participation every step of the way.