Project Sammaan’s long-term goal is to create a replicable, successful sanitation model that can be adapted by cities throughout South Asia and beyond.

In order to quantify the impact of this initiative, rigorous evaluation needs to occur. However, the methodology of this assessment requires a considerable sample size, meaning that the interventions, irrespective of their success rates, will be rolled out on a massive scale. It’s not merely one or two facilities, but well over 100 in dozens of communities; a considerable footprint to be certain.

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Project Sammaan’s initial pilot phase in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack involves the construction of 100+ separate community and public sanitation facilities. Some of these facilities will replace existing, non-functional toilet blocks on the land these failed facilities currently occupy, whereas others will be built on new land allocated by the municipal corporations for use in the project.

Irrespective of this, every site requires vetting to ensure it complies not only with building codes but also within parameters set by the project itself. In order to arrive at the final list of sites, nearly twice as many proposed areas as will be built on needed to be documented and evaluated.

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Potty Project provided a great deal of detail regarding issues around design that, if improved, could facilitate greater adoption rates of facilities by the communities they serve, and, consequently, reduce instances of open-defecation in these areas.

There will be two broad facility types:

1. Base Layer: facilities that will include only toilet stalls, menstrual waste incinerators, and handwashing stations.

2. Enhanced Layer: In addition to the base layer features, these facilities will also have bathing stalls, clothes-washing stations, and retail spaces.

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Where research and ground realities meet: Project Sammaan!

I came to this realization while helping navigate the government land approval process. The research has its own considerations while the government officials have their own set of rules, so you need to find that delicate balance that satisfies both needs.

Here’s a peek into how the Indian government (at the municipality level, in this case) functions in terms of land approvals.

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Apart from the varied insights around user behavior that the Potty Project research afforded us, we have learned that sewage and water service provisioning are also key factors ensuring the prolonged operation of facilities.

We decided early on that our designs needed to use a ‘septic tank’. This stemmed from the challenges affecting cities similar to our pilot locations in regards to sewerage access: Bhubaneswar has only a limited system while Cuttack lacks one altogether. The common practice in these instances is to couple an independent waste storage tank with a supporting bore well, for water requirements.

We observed a number of reasons for toilet facility failure due to sewage issues:

1. Lack of adequate capacity planning: In many toilets requiring on-site storage and evacuation, capacities weren’t planned appropriately. Inadequate frequency of vacuum truck evacuation caused systems to break down as the tanks flooded with excess waste water.

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Additional disabled user testing needed to be conducted, so we began seeking out participants through various channels.

After failed attempts at recruiting users through various organizations, we decided to use the snowballing method of recruitment where you ask someone you know to connect you to someone they know and so on. We looked closer to home and reached out to our office staff. Our cook, Mr. Dayanand, offered to help us recruit people from his community in ‘Chiragh Dilli’, as well as at a nearby temple where a small community of disabled people beg for alms.

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Meeting with experts, conducting “Potty Lab” exercises, and general field research led to key insights and corresponding decisions across several facility components:

WC
One of our major learnings was, though a lower-height western-style WC might be an ideal choice in terms of comfort, there was a fair bit of resistance as it differed from their preferred habit of squatting.

The reasons weren’t hygiene-related as we had previously believed, but about ingrained behavior and the belief that squatting would help with bowel movements.

From a design perspective, this left us with an interesting dilemma: how could we provide support through a western-style WC and keep it high enough for wheelchair users to side-transfer to while also allowing other users to squat? After some discussions within the team, we realized that the best solution was a ‘low height hybrid WC’.

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Users living with physical disabilities, arising from disease (such as polio), accidents, and simply old age, get the shortest end of the stick in urban slum sanitation.

We met disabled users in many slums while conducting our research and realized that designing for this small group is essential. Otherwise the project would fail to live up to its name and its associated goal of providing dignity to all through better sanitation access.

We started allocating space for a universal access stall early on, but only had a very vague idea of what the actual design would be until we worked towards our first design milestone, ‘Sketch Design 1‘. An important caveat to point out is that we focused solely on designing for mobility impairments.

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We are very happy to announce the results for the Open Innovation Challenge!

Amongst the entries received for the Architectural Design Challenge, there is one that stands out for its extremely sound contextual understanding and the effectiveness with which it translated insights into design directions.

The entry was submitted by RMA Architects and the Project Sammaan team was unanimous in selecting it as the winner. Besides responding to the brief extremely well, the entry provided new directions which could be incorporated in the architectural design’s next iteration.

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Project Sammaan is a development project that seeks to create improved sanitation services for the urban poor residing in slums in India. The project is being driven by a consortium that consists of Quicksand Design Studio, Jameel Poverty Action Lab, & the city governments of two large cities in India. It is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).

The name “Sammaan” stems from our belief that it’s very important to transform the user experience for these facilities from one heavily coated with shame to one of respect and dignity.

The project seeks to design & build 119 sanitation facilities in urban slums in India. Collectively, these facilities will have 1200+ toilets, bathrooms, spaces for washing clothes, and will benefit 60,000+ people. The project started in February 2012 and will last for 16-19 months at the end of which these toilets will be operational.

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