Sammaan and India’s Future

The future of sanitation in urban slums in India will continue to be a challenge. While government policy clearly mandates individual housing for slum-dwellers in the future, it clearly is a huge challenge that will probably take eons to take shape, due to ever-increasing patterns of migration within the country. Community sanitation has forever been neglected as an area of focus for policy and innovation, while it continues to be the only real alternative to several people living in urban slums in India. Because of this, it needs single-minded focus both from policymakers as well as stakeholders in the sector to ensure that there can be sustainable and well-designed solutions.

Project Sammaan should surely make an impact on thousands of lives in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. But I also hope that, through this “experiment”, we will be able to create a model for replicable innovation that can be adapted to various contexts and can bring better sanitation to the lives of slum-dwellers elsewhere as well.

The project’s challenges are multifold. Most innovation projects that involve the government are usually around one or the other mandate. In our case, the overall innovation + test mandates makes the context that we work in extremely complex.

Apart from the government, even partners within the project consortium often tend to underestimate this complexity and are usually concerned with their own narrow roles and responsibilities, without taking into account that everything is part of a much larger puzzle. Without constant visibility of this larger picture, efforts would tend to disconnected and fragmented and can hamper the progress of the project.

In addition to this, working with the government comes with its own set of challenges. Officials change often, thus impacting traction that the project gains at several points. Government procedures are also not geared for innovation, but for fulfilment of obligations.

Thus going beyond the usual way of doing things is often rejected and the process of change can become a long and exhausting one!