It’s been an excel-sheet filled month for Codesign this August, as the finalised Bill of Quantities (BoQ)for 14 toilet typologies, including the three added this month (2-seater enhanced layer, 4-seater enhanced layer (type-A) and 8-seater enhanced layer) have been compiled and shared with Anagram Architects to facilitate the tender process.

Generating this BoQ required us to map the various signages onto the spaces within each facility, with attention paid to the hierarchical value of each signage and the relevance of it’s message to that particular location.

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Communications efforts are a key part of Project Sammaan. In fact, the grant proposal itself identifies the creation of a dissemination toolkit as second only to reducing instances of open-defecation and improving health amongst India’s urban poor.

By extension, documenting the project’s activities is a vital exercise to ensure that as much detail as possible is captured as it unfolds. The value obviously being that information is captured as it happens, making the insights far richer and impactful than if they were revisited later on in the project.

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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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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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As we’ve written about rather extensively, Project Sammaan can be viewed as the implementation phase that builds off of insights gleaned from the year-long research study of India’s urban sanitation facilities, the “Potty Project”. Part of this study involved researching the architectural infrastructure of existing facilities to evaluate where problems were arising and what could be done to alleviate them.

One such area of exploration revolved around menstrual waste disposal and the options that were made available to women and girls. Unfortunately, we found that most facilities do not provide mechanisms for disposal of menstrual waste, nor do they provide communications interventions that foster awareness around sanitary practices regarding menstrual hygiene. As a result, many toilets are blocked by pads and towels women attempted to flush and the facility grounds are littered with used sanitary towels. In several instances, toilet booths were blocked and rendered useless due to sanitary pads being dumped in there.

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It’s that time again – to transform our architectural designs into tender documents.

Given our previous experience with the public toilet’s tender documents, we have learnt that developing a tender can be as challenging, if not much more, than the actual architectural design. Since it involves inputs from several consultants working on different elements of the design, it can lead to delays which can impact the final deadline for tender documents.

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Odisha’s specific environmental considerations, as well as other factors, such as increasing population and large proportion of people living in slums without regular access to water and sanitation, necessitates the design of a sanitation solution that is customised to these constraints.

For Project Sammaan, particularly, it is vital that the sanitation infrastructure designed and deployed as part of the pilot project exemplifies the principles and design ideologies that best meet the needs of the people and the geography of the cities.

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Anagram Architects comprises the architectural design team of Project Samman and, as such, is responsible for providing detailed architectural designs for both Public and Community toilets in Cuttack and Bhubaneswar. Our role involves understanding the existing sanitation scenario in the two cities and providing innovative design solutions to reduce the prevalent practice of open-defecation.

For this, initial site visits were made to understand the user preferences and reasons behind the failure of existing toilet designs. This was followed by a series of workshops, which helped in evolving a preliminary design framework.

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There have been a few posts in the past that have made reference to DEWATS systems in regards to the sewerage challenges the Project Sammaan team has faced. While some of these posts have shed a little light into what DEWATS is, we thought a more detailed presentation was in order.

A DEWATS system has 3 primary components:

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The sanitation crisis in Odisha is one of the worst in the country, with a vast majority of the population underserved by existing infrastructure (India Water Portal). The problem continues to escalate, with an influx of people moving in from nearby towns and villages adding to the populations density, particularly in slums, further exacerbating the problem of poor sanitation infrastructure.

An increasing population density means increased pressures on the existing infrastructure. As the number of people accessing the existing infrastructure grows, it becomes a litmus test for the quality of the sanitation services being provided by the local governments, bringing to light the primary stresses and failing points of current sanitation solutions.

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