The sanitation in India is in a critical state with sanitation habits varying based on socio-cultural practices. In a country with 35% of the population illiterate, effective communication of public health-related issues, like sanitation, is a big challenge. In spite of mega ventures like Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) and the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC, also known as the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan), 60% of the population does not have a proper structure for defecation and 90% of children’s feces is not properly managed, 23 million children below the age of 14 in urban India are at risk from poor sanitation, and 8 million children in urban areas are at risk from poor water supply leading to diarrheal disease.

Despite these programs, around 60% percent of the population remains without access to adequate sanitation. The vast majority of this unreached population is poor, rural inhabitants. By a simple estimate, India needs to ensure an additional 106 million people have access to toilets to meet the MDG target. Approximately one million people, most of them children, die due to sanitation-related diseases every year. Additionally, shame, indignity, and nuisance are inflicted upon millions of its’ people due to inadequate sanitation.

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On a recent trip to Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, members of the Project Sammaan team from Quicksand and CFAR visited slums with the intention of recording a series of interviews with community members. These conversations are part of an initiative to build off of the user-experience theme that governed Potty Project in the past and guides Project Sammaan both today and going forward.

Whereas previous visits to these communities and interactions with those living within them were focused around gaining insights that will help drive specific aspects of Project Sammaan, these visits were intentionally devoid of such parameters. These conversations were intended to afford people a platform in which they could share thoughts and opinions on their daily lives, their communities, and their aspirations for the future.

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“The Anil Agarwal Dialogues 2013: Excreta Does Matter” conference was a platform for innovators and pioneers in the fields of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) to showcase their work along with the new techniques and methodologies that hold the most promise for improved sanitation systems in India.

Organised by the Centre for Science and Environment, this, the second edition of the Anil Agarwal dialogues, was held in the India Habitat Centre. Presenters from both the public and private sector shared case studies from their work to address some of the most pressing concerns for Indian sanitation: What is the current status of India’s fresh water reserves? Where will our fresh water come from in the near and distant future? What is the state of India’s sewage system?

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We met a gentleman during a visit to Baibaba Basti in Bhubaneswar who was one of the slum’s original residents. He’s lived there for over 25 years and has been progressive in trying to get amenities and facilities for the community as a whole. One of his major successes was getting the government to sanction 3 toilet booths for the community.

A few months after these toilet booths were built, the community realized that they needed to build at least 3 more, and proceeded to build them while extending the septic tank and creating runoffs.

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We’ve developed unique insights after spending a great deal of time working, and staying, in slum communities throughout India. As such, we consider ourselves somewhat authorities in this area.

As such, it is important that we share with anyone fortunate enough to spend time in these communities advice to ensure a safe experience. Largely you just need to have the right attitude and use a little common sense, but some practical items can help as well.

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This is a series of posts that shares more about the project partners and the important roles each plays

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a network of 70 affiliated professors around the world who are united by their use of Randomized Evaluations (REs) to answer questions critical to poverty alleviation. J-PAL’s mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence.

J-PAL is the primary grantee and the project’s principal investigators and are designing and conducting the monitoring and evaluation for the facilities. They will test and scientifically evaluate the project and its various experiments using a randomised-controlled-trial methodology.

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Apart from the varied insights around user behavior that the Potty Project research afforded us, we have learned that sewage and water service provisioning are also key factors ensuring the prolonged operation of facilities.

We decided early on that our designs needed to use a ‘septic tank’. This stemmed from the challenges affecting cities similar to our pilot locations in regards to sewerage access: Bhubaneswar has only a limited system while Cuttack lacks one altogether. The common practice in these instances is to couple an independent waste storage tank with a supporting bore well, for water requirements.

We observed a number of reasons for toilet facility failure due to sewage issues:

1. Lack of adequate capacity planning: In many toilets requiring on-site storage and evacuation, capacities weren’t planned appropriately. Inadequate frequency of vacuum truck evacuation caused systems to break down as the tanks flooded with excess waste water.

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Additional disabled user testing needed to be conducted, so we began seeking out participants through various channels.

After failed attempts at recruiting users through various organizations, we decided to use the snowballing method of recruitment where you ask someone you know to connect you to someone they know and so on. We looked closer to home and reached out to our office staff. Our cook, Mr. Dayanand, offered to help us recruit people from his community in ‘Chiragh Dilli’, as well as at a nearby temple where a small community of disabled people beg for alms.

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Two children pose infront of their school in Sikharchandi.

Quicksand’s approach is about human-centered research and design and Project Sammaan encapsulates this.

An ancillary goal in this project is to engage and inform a larger community about sanitation in India specifically and life in the slums here generally.

For some of us at Quicksand, Sammaan represented the first opportunity to visit a slum community. We decided to share that experience by embedding Ryan and I (both Americans) in one of the slums we’re working with for 24-hours. The objective being to share what living without adequate sanitation would be like, if only for a short time.

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The Project Sammaan team was one of several Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grantees invited to participate in their “Reinvent the Toilet Fair” this month at the foundation’s headquarters in Seattle.

Bill Gates speaking at the Reinvent the Toilet Fair.

The fair was all things toilet: from new designs to the loo itself, to waste collection innovations and everything in between. It was amazing to see what individuals and organizations developed under the banner of “Reinventing the Toilet”: from using organisms for waste disposal and generating energy from feces, to communications interventions for shifting attitudes and preferences away from open-defecation.

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