Over the course of the past several weeks, the project management team has launched a bit of a letter-writing campaign to our partners at the municipal corporations, as well as various other senior members of the Odisha state government. The purpose of these formal correspondences is to ensure that the challenges and opinions of the non-government partners working on Project Sammaan are taken into consideration and, more importantly, become part of the permanent record for the initiative.

It can be extremely challenging navigating the bureaucracy of the municipal corporations especially when seeking to ensure that all pertinent information is communicated to all necessary parties in a timely and efficient manner. Emails are ineffective as some of the government partners lack regular access to computers and, further to that point, few have personal email addresses, making it difficult to know if messages sent to generic, catch-all (more…)

We will soon be hiring a Project Management Company to overlook construction. We are thus looking for an experienced Project Manager to manage their efforts, to represent the project consortium to the government and to oversee the project overall. Please find below a detailed job description for the same, along with job requirements and eligibility criteria.

Project Sammaan_Project Manager_Job Description_4 June

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 (more…)

Approaching the one-year mark of my involvement with Project Sammaan, I’ve spent a good deal of time lately reflecting on not only this initiative but the sanitation situation in India as a whole as well.

Being a part of this project is in and of itself something I take a lot of pride from. As it’s my first professional venture and one that involves working on a just cause (i.e., to address the serious and severe shortfall of sanitation facilities for urban communities, which, till date, is most neglected in India), my one true hope is that I can do my bit and contribute in a positive manner. It’s been a wonderful experience in meeting amazing people from different domains (more…)

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.

(more…)

The Sammaan team ended the first month of 2014 by achieving another significant milestone: the tender for the 32 Community Toilets in Cuttack has been released! This ends a nearly year-long process that was fraught with various hurdles, but one that was also rich in learnings that will enrich the project’s toolkit and, hopefully, help other organizations working in the field avoid the same missteps and challenges that we encountered.

(more…)

In Bhubaneswar, the month of January commenced with the Model Code of Conduct in place and the Elections due on 9th of January. This was followed by Urban Local Body (ULB) election on the 17th of January, 2014. The first half of the month was spent in all the administrative activities.  Most of the officials were deputed as Election officers. Nevertheless, the CMG meeting chaired by Development Commissioner gave a go ahead for the commencement of the construction work of public toilets and community toilets under Project Sammaan.

(more…)

The tender process has been long, tedious, and frustrating, but has also provided incredible insights into working with the government in implementing a project as unique and with such a scale as Sammaan, and the end is in sight. Much has been written about the tender in both this monthly newsletter and the project blog, but it is certainly a milestone worthy of such attention.

The feelings of elation shared by many partners following the tender release of the Public Toilets in Bhubaneswar were short-lived as the focus shifted to the Community Toilets, particularly the sites in Cuttack. Unlike the process that brought about the PT tender release in Bhubaneswar and is being followed for the Community Toilets there, in which the facilities are split into separate batches with total costs below the 3 crore threshold that permits the city municipalities to provide technical sanction and, therefore, release the tender, the total tender package of 32 facilities for nearly 8 crore needs to be released in Cuttack.

(more…)

With all the strategies and efforts put together, Project Samman achieved another milestone with Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) releasing the notice inviting tender for construction of public toilets in the city. This was a reason worth celebrating after a heavy task of liaising with multiple stakeholders including the technical team, Commissioner, Development Commissioner and members of the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA). Communication and discussion with multiple stakeholders led to the guidelines according to which the city engineer floated the tender call successfully.

While tender floating was successfully accomplished in BMC, Cuttack Municipal Corporation (CMC) is abuzz with activities to pitch for successful call for tenders to construct the community toilets. Further to the administrative sanction procured in the month of July, the Housing and Urban Department (H&UD) allotted funds.

(more…)

In the past few weeks and months, most of the work that has happened on Project Sammaan has involved intense collaboration between various partners in order to fulfill various deliverables for tendering the community toilets in both Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. The very nature of the hardware workstream currently involves sequential and simultaneous inputs from various partners, including Anagram Architects, the Consortium for DEWATS Dissemination (CDD), Codesign, and Arkitechno.

The usual sequence of work involves multiple steps:

(more…)