Q&A: Selva Swetha
Briefly explain your role within the Project Sammaan team. (e.g., What do you do? What is a typical day like for you?)
I am a Research Associate (RA) with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). J-PAL constitutes the research arm within Project Sammaan, where we’re testing and scientifically evaluating the project and its various experiments using a randomised-controlled-trial methodology.
Along with my co-RA Anustubh, I am based out of Bhubaneswar, where we’re responsible for coordinating the research study on the ground. Currently, we are in the midst of conducting a detailed census across more than a hundred study slums in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, collecting basic information on demographics and sanitation practices. This would also serve as a sampling frame for the baseline activities.
On a given day, we might make unplanned field visits checking on data collection, running various checks on and performing preliminary cleaning of the data using STATA, or working with a small team of surveyors in field piloting the baseline instrument (which would already be at its n-dozen-th iteration) as we try and fine-tune questions and ensure we are able to elicit the required information through each question.
All the while, Anustubh might be engrossed in working out complex power calculations trying to arrive at the optimal sample size for our research design, or meeting with a basti (slum community) president who has expressed concern over us surveying the residents, or even waiting at the Slum Improvement Officer’s office for a meeting to discuss the potential toilet construction sites and approvals.
What excites you most about working on Project Sammaan?
The trans-disciplinary approach to tackling the sanitation challenge is something that I find very exciting; that Project Sammaan is a confluence of elements of human-centred design innovation, architecture, economics, social and behavioural science.
It’s fantastic that the design of the facilities has been a process in itself, and is the result of detailed ethnographic research taking into account usability considerations, but we don’t stop there. It is even more exciting that there’s the whole social engineering aspect where we are looking at enacting behaviour change through habit formation experiments, testing various facility management models, pricing methods and subsidy rates, and also engaging communities with Community-Led-Total Sanitation (CLTS) campaigns; and that moreover, all of these will be rigorously evaluated.
On a personal level, I am particularly excited about the habit formation aspect which generally tends to get overlooked when we talk about sanitation – the idea we can design a set of interventions that can (or cannot, as we’ll eventually find out!) trigger the formation of habits around (and eventually normalising) toilet usage as opposed to automatically resorting to open defecation.
How is Project Sammaan different from other projects you’ve worked on?
The sheer complexity of the large web of partners involved, ranging from design innovators to empirical researchers to the governments, each with their specific roles, and each pivotal to the whole project is quite different. Also, this comprehensive trans-disciplinary approach, rather than viewing the problem through a single lens, is unique to Project Sammaan.