Improved sanitation for Bhubaneswar & Cuttack
As part of the communications team, my field visit brief was to get an initial understanding of the environment for the sanitation facility as well as of the visual culture of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack.
In my short, three-day visit, I covered two slums in Bhubaneswar and another in Cuttack. This was my first visit so it was also important to interact with the on-field teams working in Odisha as much as possible.
This is a series of posts that shares more about the project partners and the important roles each plays
At its most basic level, Project Sammaan will provide functional sanitation facilities to slum communities that desperately need them. As such, the insights and learnings that led to the development of the project’s interventions need to be translated into brick-and-mortar buildings, meaning that an architectural firm, particularly one with a keen sense of function as well as form, is vital.
This is a series of posts that shares more about the project partners and the important roles each plays
Quicksand is a multi-disciplinary innovation consultancy that places user-centered design principles at the core of every innovation effort. The studio has successfully delivered on several new services, products, brands and developmental strategies, creating both measurable social and business impact.
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.
Project Sammaan will lead to two things: 1) the reduction of open-defecation and improvement of health amongst urban poor, and 2) the creation of a “toolkit” for successful sanitation interventions that can be replicated throughout South Asia.
The second point served as the impetus for a recent Quicksand field visit to Bhubaneswar to meet with project partners for a review of activities, milestones, learnings, frustrations, and other pertinent developments. It’s hard to believe, but the project has been underway for over 6 months now and the team felt it was a perfect time to get all the partners together.
Incorporating these conversations into the toolkit is certainly a daunting task considering the number of partners involved and the complexity of their individual workstreams. However, these concerns are part of the challenge that got us excited about this grant and they continue to motivate us.
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.
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’.
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.
With the architectural design stream moving along nicely, it was time to initiate the Brand Design workstream. While Project Sammaan is the internal name for the project, the sanitation facilities we design and build will carry their own brand identity.
It’s important to brand these sanitation facilities appropriately to ensure:
Supplies needed to make our very own paper toilet!
This month, we started working on detailing the bathing stall, toilet booth and disabled access booth designs after completing our community feedback sessions in Bhubaneshwar.
We crafted a long list of activities and design aspects requiring user feedback at the end of Sketch Design 1. These user-centric insights are absolutely vital in ensuring that the designs are a response to what end-users need and not just “more of the same”.