Project Sammaan is a unique innovation initiative due to the diversity of the organizations working on it: design firms, government bodies, empirical researchers, architectural firms, waste management experts, community engagement specialists, and an interface management team.

This amalgamation of seemingly disparate entities provides a robust and exhaustive approach that ensures community members’ needs are designed for, the facilities are both functional and valued, and the effectiveness of the engagement is thoroughly evaluated.

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We met a gentleman during a visit to Baibaba Basti in Bhubaneswar who was one of the slum’s original residents. He’s lived there for over 25 years and has been progressive in trying to get amenities and facilities for the community as a whole. One of his major successes was getting the government to sanction 3 toilet booths for the community.

A few months after these toilet booths were built, the community realized that they needed to build at least 3 more, and proceeded to build them while extending the septic tank and creating runoffs.

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This is part of a series of posts that shares more about the project partners and the important roles each plays.

CTRAN Consulting manages large, complex development projects by providing a mix of program management and technical assistance.

For Project Sammaan, they are the one-point contact for interfacing with various government agencies. In this role, they facilitate meetings with government representatives, assist in the land approval process, and are establishing Project Management Offices within BMC and CMC.

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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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Two children pose infront of their school in Sikharchandi.

Quicksand’s approach is about human-centered research and design and Project Sammaan encapsulates this.

An ancillary goal in this project is to engage and inform a larger community about sanitation in India specifically and life in the slums here generally.

For some of us at Quicksand, Sammaan represented the first opportunity to visit a slum community. We decided to share that experience by embedding Ryan and I (both Americans) in one of the slums we’re working with for 24-hours. The objective being to share what living without adequate sanitation would be like, if only for a short time.

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