With all the strategies and efforts put together, Project Samman achieved another milestone with Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) releasing the notice inviting tender for construction of public toilets in the city. This was a reason worth celebrating after a heavy task of liaising with multiple stakeholders including the technical team, Commissioner, Development Commissioner and members of the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA). Communication and discussion with multiple stakeholders led to the guidelines according to which the city engineer floated the tender call successfully.

While tender floating was successfully accomplished in BMC, Cuttack Municipal Corporation (CMC) is abuzz with activities to pitch for successful call for tenders to construct the community toilets. Further to the administrative sanction procured in the month of July, the Housing and Urban Department (H&UD) allotted funds.

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In the spring of 2013, members of the Project Sammaan team from CFAR and Quicksand spent the day visiting one of the bastis (i.e., slums) in Bhubaneswar. The purpose of this visit, as I wrote about in a previous post, was to provide a platform for community members to discuss any aspects of their lives that they wished to, irrespective of its relevance to Sammaan.

We intentionally kept the questions vague and open-ended to encourage interviewees to share as much as possible. Queries such as, “What is it like living here?” and “What do you like and dislike about your community?” led to some great insights.

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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.

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There has been an exciting new development with Project Sammaan. Siva Cotipalli has disengaged from the initiative due to other, more pressing professional considerations and I have taken over his responsibilities as project manager.

The change comes at a fairly critical juncture in Sammaan as we continue working towards the release of the tender for the Public Toilets in Bhubaneswar and securing the technical sanctions for the Community Toilets in both Cuttack and Bhubaneswar.

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The main field milestone in August has been the completion of the census data collection. As I write this update, the team is gearing up for what will be their last census field session. We follow a rule of a site-wide first-pass followed by two revisits for each unfinished household. Today the field team is preparing for a second revisit at the last remaining site.

With the completion of this last batch of 10 sites in Bhubaneswar, what has been nearly a 11-month long exercise draws to a close. In this time, we have, in total, surveyed 32 sites in Cuttack, and about a 100 sites in Bhubaneswar, covering over 20,000 households in Bhubaneswar and 7,000 households in Cuttack. The overall completion rates in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack stand at around 87% and 90%, respectively.

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The tendering process for all building works remains the same whether it is roads, railways, or sanitation; the simple objective is to construct the infrastructure or facilities by a contractor.

As Project Management Consultants, Arkitechno evaluates the capabilities of the contractor and then supervises the work along with quality control, check-in measurements and payment certification.

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The month of May was all about coordinating for the advancement of the project and the pending deliverables to be accomplished. CTRAN successfully coordinated for the exposure visit to Nagpur for the DEWATS system. Apart from this CTRAN arranged and corresponded for the monthly meetings on the 8th and 9th of this month.

Multiple interactions with other divisions concerned with water supply and sewerage for creating a database of information on the sewerage connections in the proposed locations were facilitated.

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As part of Project Sammaan, J-PAL is studying how improved community sanitation models impact open defecation rates in urban slums in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. J-PAL is currently conducting large scale surveys in the communities Project Sammaan works in.

As a first step, J-PAL defines the communities using maps. Based on these maps the J-PAL’s survey team conducts a door to door census survey. This census survey provides the basis for a more in-depth baseline study.

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On a recent trip to Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, members of the Project Sammaan team from Quicksand and CFAR visited slums with the intention of recording a series of interviews with community members. These conversations are part of an initiative to build off of the user-experience theme that governed Potty Project in the past and guides Project Sammaan both today and going forward.

Whereas previous visits to these communities and interactions with those living within them were focused around gaining insights that will help drive specific aspects of Project Sammaan, these visits were intentionally devoid of such parameters. These conversations were intended to afford people a platform in which they could share thoughts and opinions on their daily lives, their communities, and their aspirations for the future.

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