Ensuring Sammaan’s Construction

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.

Unfortunately though, the Government has not received a single qualified bid on any of these toilet tenders. Both the public and community toilets had to be re-tendered and are currently on the e-tender system of the two municipal corporations. To be honest, we aren’t very hopeful of a positive response this time around either and are trying to figure an alternative – something that will require brainstorming at a more strategic level.

The problem of a tender going unsolicited is symptomatic of a deeper problem especially when you look at the construction and engineering players that exist in smaller cities like Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. While designing the tenders, we were careful not to leave it open to contractors who did not have the necessary technical competence to deliver these toilets at the level of quality that the project demanded. Toilets are, by no measure, a hi-tech piece of infrastructure and Project Sammaan designs have used locally available materials and building processes wherever possible. Even so the most common problems of failure in community sanitation are choked sewer lines, broken floor slabs, incorrect floor levels and gradients – these are all minor technical aspects that, if executed incorrectly, can irrevocably and unfavourably impact the end user experience. The nature of construction activity is such that several of these technicalities can’t be fixed by the book – site specific peculiarities require on the spot decisions to be made which will ensure that construction parameters are suitably modified so that some critical UX outcomes are not compromised.

Ensuring quality construction is therefore not a major ask – but one that relies almost solely on attention to detail and robust project management protocols. In our understanding and for the given project context, we believe it demands capable engineering and site supervision teams, rigorously implemented project management processes and an experience of managing construction activities that will be distributed over the length and breadth of a city. It must also be noted that the master-planning and design of Project Sammaan toilets has happened through lead architects and technical experts that are spread across the country. While the dependence on these agencies during the construction phase is minimal, it is reasonable to expect that several technical issues will be resolved real time and for which certain back and forth between the construction partner and these agencies will be necessary.

And that is where we believe we have faced problems in securing qualified proposals for construction. The level of competence of local contractors, who are also the players who most often bid for these tenders, is limited. Most infrastructure projects tendered by the Government, especially in the sanitation sector, are stand alone projects which are implemented by smaller contractors. Large sanitation projects are mostly beyond the purview of typical contractors who work in this sector. Bigger infrastructure projects, which span different sectors like roads, bridges, institutional buildings etc follow a more classical PPP (Public-Private-Partnership) model wherein the contractor is awarded the project on a turnkey basis – of master planning, designing and operationalising the facility. Project Sammaan finds itself in the middle of this spectrum – wherein it is large enough to be beyond the ambit of local contractors and yet isn’t at a scale that would merit the interest of more professional construction firms. On the other hand, it does not follow a PPP model either since Project Sammaan is commissioned only to provide technical assistance to the Government.

Given this conundrum, we have initiated a few measures that may throw up some viable alternatives. First and foremost is a brainstorm with the top Government bureaucracy to understand if there are workarounds or recommendations on how this gap may be plugged. We are soon to have that conversation and will keep the community updated of what comes out of it.

The other has been to reach out to the top construction firms in the country – the likes of Larsen and Toubro, IL&FS, Jaypee Group and some other tier-2 but pan-India firms like GKCPL and others. The project size of approximately INR 30cr may not find favor with these firms most of whom have a threshold of approximately INR 100cr to be commercially interested in tendering for such projects. However we believe this may be an opportunity to tap into the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) mandates of these firms. We have reached out to these firms with a request to consider bidding for this project through their CSR initiatives if not mainstream businesses. The case we are making is around the long term goal of Project Sammaan, i.e. to replicate a successful implementation of this model across other Indian cities. Enough has been said about the abysmal state of sanitation in Indian cities and villages alike. As a CSR collaboration, this may be one of the most significant contributions that a corporation can make towards India’s development goals.

Scaling Project Sammaan is also one of the most important outcomes which has necessitated large investments by the donors in rigorous evaluation methodologies. If we can convince some of these corporations to look at the long term vision of the project, it may very well be the first step in galvanising a large private sector for which sanitation has mostly been a blind spot. This is also, potentially, an important advocacy task that faces the sanitation sector – for once not within Government corridors but within the private and commercial sector that is, in any case, invested in building the country’s infrastructure deficit.

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