Progress Report & Looking Ahead

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 addresses (e.g., the email address for an Executive Engineer at the BMC is ‘me1@bmc.go.in’ ) even go through. Meetings are largely impractical as finding a time that works with all parties that would need to attend is nearly impossible. Further to that, meetings that are scheduled are often cancelled at the last minute or rescheduled without any consideration for other people’s schedules. Due to these and many more reasons, the simplest solution has been simply to write formal letters and have copies distributed to all parties concerned. This tends to be time-consuming and wasteful in terms of resources, but until a better option is found this will remain a “necessary evil”.

The real reason behind this barrage of letters that have descended upon the various government agencies working on Project Sammaan is quite simple: the continued delays in commencing construction is seriously jeopardizing the initiative. This fact had somehow become the 800-pound gorilla in the room that no one wanted to mention, but simply ignoring a problem is surely not going to resolve it. The delays have cost people their jobs, have led to organizations disengaging from the project altogether, have seriously and possible irrevocably damaged relationships between organizations still working on the project, cost untold financial losses, and, most importantly, left the tens of thousands of residents in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack that will benefit from the project without the sanitation facilities they so desperately need.

The hope is that through openly and honestly sharing the realities impacting Project Sammaan the entire project team will begin to understand and appreciate how their work on an individual level impacts the progress of the initiative as a whole. It is rather disconcerting to go back through the newsletters and blog posts over the past year to see how desperate the team has been in inculcating a sense of team spirit and to get the project over this heinous tender hump that has stalled the initiative’s progress since February 2013.

Several team members have expressed their displeasure with the communication efforts on the project, comparing both the blog and this newsletter to simple public relations fluff and stating that they do not adequately convey “real” information about the project. The letters attempt to cut to the heart of the matter and, going forward, so will the rest of the communication efforts. Again, no one benefits from ignoring a problem. Like cancer, even the smallest issue can grow to be something deadly and the team cannot afford any additional setbacks.

As of the end of May, the construction tendering is still the primary challenge the project faces. There is some hope that the contracts can be awarded in the coming weeks for the Public Toilets in Bhubaneswar, but the Community Toilets in both cities still require some time and a lot of effort. The team is awaiting approval from the H&UD department on splitting the single package of 32 facilities into smaller packages in an effort to entice more bidders, and to lessen the qualification burden imposed on them. The review of documents for the CTs in Bhubaneswar are still underway and no timeframe for completion has been communicated from the government to the rest of the team.

Quite simply put, Project Sammaan will fail and tens of thousands of people in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack will be forced into using unsafe and unsanitary sanitation options, such as open-defecating, if all of those working on the initiative do not approach it as a team. It’s no more, nor no less, complicated than that. We need to approach our work not only with an appropriate sense of urgency, but also with the understanding that our individual efforts affect the project as a whole.

Leave a Reply