Letters, Meetings, and a Whole Lot of Patience

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 affecting the upkeep of this blog lies in its fundamental purpose: to share project progress as it happens to act as a repository for learnings that will populate the toolkit. It begs the question, then, as to what should be shared if progress is not being made. As those working on the project, and those regularly following the blog, can unfortunately all-too-well attest, we’ve been stuck in a rut for some time now, desperately trying to move beyond the tendering phase and to start building the Sammaan facilities.

This is not to say that we’ve not made progress on various other fronts, such as finalizing the Sammaan identity or working on the facilities’ O&M strategy, but any “wins” are quickly tempered by the glaring fact that after nearly 2.5 years, we still have not starting construction. Despite all of the planning and strategizing that went into creating the project’s timelines and structuring the grant with our funding agency and contracts with our government partners and various other stakeholders, the project is grossly delayed, to the point where its very viability, at least financially, is now in question. Building off the need to share learnings in an effort to help others working in this sector, I felt it important to share, honestly and frankly, some aspects of the Sammaan experience that, had we known about at the onset, would have significantly altered our approach to the project, especially in regards to timelines.

If I were pressed to give one reason to explain the delays Sammaan has faced, it would be this: the non-government partners are working off of a stringent timeline that our government partners do not feel beholden to. What we are trying to accomplish is fine and all, and our government partners have bought into the benefits of Sammaan, but there is a real disconnect between what is needed to successfully implement this project and how the government approaches their responsibilities within it. The tendering process is a perfect case-in-point example of this.

We began working on Project Sammaan in January 2012. It took pretty much that entire year to engage with the various stakeholders needed to implement the project, finalize agreements with the local government agencies in the pilot cities, and complete the designs for the 100+ facilities. In early 2013, we began the tendering process with the government. To put it as simply as possible, tendering involves getting all of the designs approved and the associated documentation prepared for public dissemination to invite contractors to bid on constructing the facilities. Based on internal conversations with the government partners, we were anticipating this process taking at most a few months. This “fact” was only reinforced by the Times of India article “32 community toilets for Cuttack slums” from February 2013 in which an Executive Engineer from the Cuttack Municipal Corporation was quoted as saying, “We have plans to start construction work of community toilets from the last week of February.” Nearly 16 months later and not only has construction not started, we are nowhere nearer to awarding the contracts to builders than we were the day this article was published. The same can certainly be said for the facilities in Bhubaneswar as well.

Many of the challenges the project has faced are due to differences in approaches and protocols that I recently wrote about: meetings need to be held in person to discuss the project, rather than simply discussing over email or a phone call, thousands of pages of documents need to be submitted for review, time-consuming to both produce and analyze, and surprisingly easy to lose forcing re-prints of everything; information-sharing tends to be a one-way street with little or no transparency on the internal processes and associated timelines of government activities; meetings are often repeatedly cancelled, and at the last minute, with no regard for the impact doing so has on progress, not to mention morale; and on and on. The basic sentiment one is left feeling is that “what the government says, goes” and there’s no circumventing that. This was probably best encapsulated in a statement by someone who is no longer working on Sammaan when she sincerely asked, “Why don’t we just give all the money to the government and let them work on their own timelines? That’s what they’re going to do anyways”.

Like the individual that shared this statement, many people and organizations have disengaged from Project Sammaan since its inception, whether of their own accord or from being relieved of duty due to lack of progress on their workstream. Fair or not, the project consortium has reacted to the continued delays as any group would be expected to: by brutally evaluating the work of every individual and making the necessary course corrections to ensure any bottlenecks are alleviated and any “dead weight” shed. Despite these extreme, cathartic measures, the project is still limping along.

Now, this may sound unduly critical of the government partners, and readers may find themselves wondering how these individuals may react to such a blatant, hyper-critical assessment of their work, but this is in and of itself remarkable: to a person, every government partner that I’ve spoken to has echoed these same concerns; that the bureaucracy is so inefficient and overwhelming that everyone knows working with the government is maddening and rapidly devolves into a war of attrition. What’s truly striking is the lack of personal responsibility anyone feels. When speaking about the shortcomings of the government, it’s done in near Jungian terms; there is some external force to blame, a generalized other acting as tormentor that prevents work from being done in a timely, efficient manner. The lack of transparency in bureaucratic processes allows for a seeming lack of any personal responsibility or accountability.

It is a truly helpless and hopeless feeling to work towards something only to have the rules of the game change so drastically and regularly. After 28 months of working on the project, my role has been reduced to a very basic core: to write letters that document every conversation irrespective of how trivial so that it can become part of the project’s official record, to live and work out of the Bhubaneswar office so that someone is at the government’s beck and call whenever a meeting is possible, and to beg, cajole, and even threaten project partners in an effort to keep everyone working with an appropriate sense of urgency.

This experience has been invaluable and, despite the significant challenges faced each day, richly rewarding on a personal and professional level. My one true hope through all of this is that by sharing the challenges and experience of Sammaan will allow others to avoid the same pitfalls, or in the very least to provide a level of understanding that allows for more accurate planning that takes into consideration the considerable investment of time and energy required to execute a project with the government here.

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