The National Buildings Construction Corporation (NBCC) has been awarded the contract to construct all 26 Community Toilets and 21 of the 27 Public Toilets in Bhubaneswar as part of Project Sammaan. (The contract for the six remaining Public Toilets is still pending despite a qualified bidder, the Vinayak Agency, being identified through an open tender nearly six months ago). The motion to award NBCC the contracts for Cuttack’s 31 Community Toilets is expected to be passed this week, and the formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed soon thereafter.

NBCC is a massive Public Sector Unit headquartered in Delhi that takes on projects across India, as well as in overseas locations such as Iraq, Libya, Nepal, Yemen, and Turkey. The company’s services is broadly in three segments: Project Management Consultancy, Real Estate (more…)

My colleague Kevin has posted recent updates on the current status of nominating a construction agency for building the toilet facilities in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. As mentioned, we are waiting on final approvals from the government and are hopeful that we will soon have a contractor confirmed, following which we can start pre-construction activities at the sites. As such, we are hopeful that we will soon break ground and see the beginning of construction.

This has come after several months of tendering activity. The design team that has worked on the various sorts of toilet facilities, have long completed all the requisite work to begin construction. (more…)

The Anagram team has been exceptionally busy the last few months due to the progress being made on getting the tenders released, with construction hopefully set to commence in the coming months once the contracts are awarded.

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The primary focus of Anagram’s work on Sammaan right now involves detailing out the working drawings for each of the facilities. As one can imagine, providing the granular details for each of the 119 facilities being built is quite an undertaking. This is especially so considering that each drawing requires the inputs of several project partners.

A lot of our time is dedicated to interfacing with these partners to ensure that their questions are answered in a timely manner and any necessary changes are incorporated as quickly as possible. Anagram is working closely with CDD on the designs of the sewerage systems, with Codesign to detail out spaces for signage, and with Arkitechno to review and evaluate each drawing. Additionally, we’re reporting into Quicksand along the way to keep them abreast of developments and challenges we’re facing.

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September, what a month!! Anagram is glad it’s over, as is its work of making good for construction drawings (GFCs) for Cuttack toilet. It was such an amazing month filled with loads of detailing, discussions, management within the in-house design team and the consultants’  decision-making, and refining, refining, refining the designs.

Taking into consideration the lifestyle of an entirely different strata of society in the detailing meant trying to view things from the user’s perspective while keeping foresightedness in mind. This led to the Anagram team working tirelessly and, ultimately, adding more members to the team. This meant that half of the office was working on the project! The doubling of the team was done not only to meet the deadline but also to provide further assistance in refining the designs.

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August has been an incredibly busy month for Anagram Architects and CDD. The tender documents were prepared for the 32 Community Toilet sites in Cuttack and Anagram anchored the process of preparing a bulk of this, and compiling that with inputs from CDD and Codesign, for the sewage treatment systems & signage respectively. With this, all the work for the tender stage has been completed for 11 of the Community Toilet typologies.

The first round of the documents were submitted to the CMC, with the support of Arkitechno. Most of the latter part of the August was spent in revising and correcting some of the estimates in order to work towards the total sanctioned amount of the Preliminary Project Report for Cuttack.

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Modern sanitation engineering and urban planning were borne out of the strategies adopted by many of Europe’s great cities to manage their urban crises of the 1800s. Creaking, as they were, under the pressures of overpopulation, epidemics, squalor and riots, most cities underwent a drastic spatial and infrastructure overhaul.

The Great Stink of London in the summer of 1858 led to the creation of its sewer network by Sir Joseph Bazalgette and by 1870 the duo of Baron Hausmann and Eugène Belgrand delivered Paris from its perpetual battle against coups, cholera, and congestion. Primarily involving  retrofitting centralised sewerage and piped water supply to existing quarters, it also involved decongesting precincts and clearing built mass in order to improve light and ventilation and mitigate social unrest.

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In an earlier post, Khyati from Anagram Architects talked about some of the architectural design principles that will be adopted across the toilets in Bhubaneswar & Cuttack.

Here are some additional features across the 92 community toilets that we will build across Bhubaneswar & Cuttack, that will be unique and will facilitate a better user experience:

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The last month has been exceptional in terms of progress of the architectural work. The deadlines for Project Sammann have always been challenging, but this time the work was fourfold and the deadline was even tighter.

Earlier we submitted tender and good for construction drawings (GFCs) for the Public Toilets, which were six designs covering 27 sites. This time for the community toilets (CTs) in Cuttack and Bhubaneswar we had 14 designs covering 32 and 43 sites, respectively, with the same stringent deadline as with the Public Toilets. On top of that, the whole process was delayed by two weeks due to various reasons. However, Anagram took the responsibility to bring the whole project back on track.

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Building off of site visits and research work shared by our partners, we observed that, in the current scenario, the toilets were considered as a zone of filth. As such they were misused, making it unsafe, particularly for women and children. There was a major need to upgrade the experience of visiting a Public/ Community toilet.

Therefore, our designs were formulated on the basis of following principles:

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