Project Dissemination Activities
In the middle of all the madness that surrounds the release of tenders this month, we have somehow presented Project Sammaan at more forums this last fortnight than we have in the last year. This could be just plain coincidence, or that we are a little more comfortable talking about the hardware phase of the project now that the architectural designs are complete and the tenders are ready to be floated.
Whatever the reason for that may be, one thing it forces you to do is to distill down the project to its most basic parts. So here’s a 10-minute, podium pitch on what Project Sammaan has achieved to date and the key challenges (which have also been written about in a post here):
I also wanted to share briefly some interesting questions that were raised at some of these forums and our responses to those:
Expert Webinar on “Innovative Sanitation Solutions for Urban Areas” – SuSanA
As part of the ongoing efforts of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to stimulate discussion and sharing of information amongst grantees and the wider community working in the area of sanitation, we were invited by SuSanA to present our work on Project Sammaan. The session was hosted as a webinar with about 15 participants from all over the world in attendance and 3 Gates Foundation grantees presenting their work.
These were:
Communal Sanitation Solutions for Urban Slums (Project Sammaan) – represented by me, Ayush Chauhan (New Delhi, India)
Mobile Sanitation Services for Dense Urban Slums – represented by Kory Russel (Stanford, USA)
Catalyzing Sanitation Businesses – represented by Sherina Munyana (Uganda)
It’s a minor miracle how effortlessly the session ran, notwithstanding Internet connectivity issues at various parts of the world and the general unwieldiness of most of these online collaboration tools.
An interesting exchange that happened at the forum was around the sewage treatment solution for public and community toilets. The question was around how the project proposed to manage the risk caused by poor sewage management infrastructure in the cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack.
While it is true that we have got approval to provide on site sewage treatment facilities in only 20% of the total sites, the remaining 80% toilets are being designed with an improved septic tank and percolation pit. In spite of this, the risk of these systems failing is fairly high because of high groundwater levels in these cities. This has been a sticky ground for the project and significant time was lost in trying to convince the city administrations to move forward with decentralised systems in absence of a city wide sewerage network.
We made only partial headway on this front – however, there are two ways in which this risk can still be mitigated:
– the toilets have been designed such that once the sewerage network comes in (plans for which are already afoot in both the cities), they can be plugged into the centralised sewage treatment system;
– once the O&M models are designed, we can look at new technologies (such as the Omni Ingester which works similar to the vacuum trucks used for emptying septic tanks but with onsite treatment capability) that can be built into the business model of these toilets.
It is in the nature of such large infrastructure projects, that the design and planning must afford piecemeal development of an optimal system. It is nearly impossible to have a 100% optimal solution at one shot.
More information on this session can be found at this link.
Development Partner’s Meeting: Water & Sanitation Program
The development partner’s meeting is a quarterly conference organised by the WSP for various practitioners working in the area of sanitation. About 5-6 partners get to present their work and solicit interest or greater participation in their projects. I was one of the presenters this time around.
One of the questions raised was around land rights and related caste issues that are inherent when new infrastructure is being created in urban slums. Due to strongly entrenched caste barriers, restricted property rights get created which limits the access of these toilets to more privileged sections of the community. A related concern is the fact that community toilets by their very nature do not address gender safety and privacy because of a common facility, and hence have done little in addressing gender issues around sanitation.
While both of these concerns are legitimate, I tried to impress upon the audience that the project makes no tall claims for universal coverage of communities where these toilets are located. It is understood that only a certain catchment area around the land where these toilets are being built will be serviced by the facility. It is also true that a community toilet does not match the benefits, especially from a gender perspective, that a private toilet allows. However, once we have acknowledged these constraints, the question to be asked is whether these toilets deliver the stated benefits as effectively as they can even within the given limitations. We should be able to demonstrate that:
– the institution that manages the toilet does not discriminate access on the basis of caste or any other separatist lines;
– women that choose to embrace these facilities, must not feel compromised in anyway, whether it is safety, privacy, or other gender-specific features like menstrual waste management, child care, and other concerns.
I think if we are able to deliver within these limitations, these toilets will be a significantly improved infrastructure over what is out there today.
In addition to this, my colleague Babitha presented the project at a design symposium in Vienna, Austria. We will have more on that when she returns.