Public Toilet Tender Released!

We have achieved quite a milestone with Project Sammaan: the tender for the Public Toilets in Bhubaneswar has been released! This is a big step forward for the project and one that has taken the combined efforts of virtually all team members to accomplish.

One of the aspects of Sammaan that initially had team members so excited about the project was its innovative approach to addressing open-defecation, generally, and fixing the urban slum sanitation facility model, specifically. The layers of innovation cover everything from the design of the physical infrastructure to the business models and demand-generation activities employed to ensure increased, and sustained, adoption rates amongst users.

The project has very much been a learning process for all of the partners and stakeholders, as is the case with any new initiative seeking to “break the mold” and re-think a tried and true, if largely unsuccessful, manner of doing things. (The mandate to develop a toolkit that chronicles and shares these learnings is reflective of this underlying nature). One key takeaway from the tender process as we’ve experienced it is that, with something new, comes a whole lot of questions to be answered and anxieties to be assuaged.

As compared to a standard infrastructural project (e.g., building a bridge) that has been done before and, therefore, has a tried-and-true method for evaluation and approval, Project Sammaan’s facilities involve “reinventing the wheel” a little bit. As such, there is no baseline for comparison, aside from the failed facilities whose design we’re improving upon in order to make our facilities more viable, sustainable, user-friendly, and environmentally sound. No one is arguing against the need for such enhancements and improvements, but there was a real sense of recalcitrance in approving all aspects of the project simply because some of them (e.g., menstrual waste incinerators) had not been tried before.

Addressing these completely understandable concerns meant providing as much information on each of the interventions being employed in the Sammaan facilities. This, in turn, meant the process took far longer than anticipated. Aside from creating delays in the overall project, an ancillary effect was a bit of frustration amongst the partners as we sat in limbo waiting for the required approvals to come.

That said, it was more a case of people suffering together than it was a divided camp. The teams based in Bhubaneswar were diligent in following up with the representatives at the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC), and the teams based in Delhi and Bangalore did everything they could to support these efforts. Ultimately, it was because of these concerted, and constant, efforts that all concerns, great and small, were addressed as quickly and clearly as possible.

This will be an e-tender open to all qualified contractors, accessible through the BMC’s website. The tender goes live online at 11a IST on 19/11 and will remain open to bidders until 5p IST on 3/12. We wish the best of luck to all those bidding on our project and look forward to breaking ground together in the near future.

For journalists interested in covering this story, the press release can be found here.