The project team received some very disheartening news in a recent meeting with senior government officials: funding for the Community Toilets in Bhubaneswar has been drastically reduced. This budget cut translates to the construction for 34 of the 60 planned facilities being delayed indefinitely.

The timing of this news was especially difficult for the team as the tender documents for the 60 planned facilities had just been finalized and the release of the notice inviting bids from interested contractors thought to be imminent. Given the 15 months of effort that involved the (more…)

Over the course of the past several weeks, the project management team has launched a bit of a letter-writing campaign to our partners at the municipal corporations, as well as various other senior members of the Odisha state government. The purpose of these formal correspondences is to ensure that the challenges and opinions of the non-government partners working on Project Sammaan are taken into consideration and, more importantly, become part of the permanent record for the initiative.

It can be extremely challenging navigating the bureaucracy of the municipal corporations especially when seeking to ensure that all pertinent information is communicated to all necessary parties in a timely and efficient manner. Emails are ineffective as some of the government partners lack regular access to computers and, further to that point, few have personal email addresses, making it difficult to know if messages sent to generic, catch-all (more…)

We will soon be hiring a Project Management Company to overlook construction. We are thus looking for an experienced Project Manager to manage their efforts, to represent the project consortium to the government and to oversee the project overall. Please find below a detailed job description for the same, along with job requirements and eligibility criteria.

Project Sammaan_Project Manager_Job Description_4 June

The sanitation crisis is indeed a multi-dimensional problem – a realisation that gets reinforced and becomes more stark as we move through every new phase of the project. And I am not referring only to the behavioural, demand-led challenges in sanitation but to infrastructure development issues and the economics of it all.

Until now the biggest challenge for us was to get the tenders released – a task that required multiple, inter-dependent approvals and processes to be tackled starting with sites, design, sewage, financials, standard operating procedures of the Government, elections so on and so forth. One of the biggest achievements of the project team in the last six months has been the successful release of nearly all the toilets being proposed; 27 Public toilets of Bhubaneswar were released in early December 2013 and 32 community toilets of Cuttack in early Feb 2014. The remaining 60 community toilets of Bhubaneswar are due to go under the hammer any time in the next two weeks.

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A critical decision facing the consortium at this stage is the quality and timeliness for construction as it gets underway.

For the long term sustainability of the project, it is important that we adopt processes and protocols that are in line with existing government practices. Due to this, the project team has been working towards the tendering route wherein the government puts an open call for bids from potential contractors and selects on the basis of certain pre-determined criteria for the construction phase.

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The construction vendors are identified through an exhaustive tendering process managed by Feedback Foundation. The tendering process is administered by the local governments and it is supported by the project team. It is important for the project team to understand the documents that need to be submitted along with the approvals required so that the process is completed within project’s timeline.

Feedback Foundation interfaced with the BMC engineering team to obtain more details on the tendering process and to review the tender documents that had already been prepared. They also collaborated with Anagram Architects on incorporating the facility design changes suggested by the engineering team. These efforts help to ensure that the process is completed in a timely manner with all requisite approvals in place.

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