Community Census

As part of Project Sammaan, J-PAL is studying how improved community sanitation models impact open defecation rates in urban slums in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. J-PAL is currently conducting large scale surveys in the communities Project Sammaan works in.

As a first step, J-PAL defines the communities using maps. Based on these maps the J-PAL’s survey team conducts a door to door census survey. This census survey provides the basis for a more in-depth baseline study.

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Q&A: Selva Swetha

Briefly explain your role within the Project Sammaan team. (e.g., What do you do? What is a typical day like for you?)

I am a Research Associate (RA) with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). J-PAL constitutes the research arm within Project Sammaan, where we’re testing and scientifically evaluating the project and its various experiments using a randomised-controlled-trial methodology.

Along with my co-RA Anustubh, I am based out of Bhubaneswar, where we’re responsible for coordinating the research study on the ground. Currently, we are in the midst of conducting a detailed census across more than a hundred study slums in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, collecting basic information on demographics and sanitation practices. This would also serve as a sampling frame for the baseline activities.

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Outreach & Public Relations Update

The mandate to document and share Project Sammaan developments and learnings manifests itself in many ways, and April’s activities are a prime example of this, with a video being produced, a media kit developed, blog posts being added to the website, and, most significantly, formal project reports for the municipal corporations drafted.

Members of the Quicksand and CFAR teams visited slums in Bhubaneswar at the beginning of the month to interview community members for a “voice of the people” video. Additionally, CFAR transcribed the video clips into the Odiya font, allowing their comments to be conveyed exactly as they were said.

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India’s Sanitation Challenges & Project Sammaan

The sanitation in India is in a critical state with sanitation habits varying based on socio-cultural practices. In a country with 35% of the population illiterate, effective communication of public health-related issues, like sanitation, is a big challenge. In spite of mega ventures like Central Rural Sanitation Programme (CRSP) and the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC, also known as the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan), 60% of the population does not have a proper structure for defecation and 90% of children’s feces is not properly managed, 23 million children below the age of 14 in urban India are at risk from poor sanitation, and 8 million children in urban areas are at risk from poor water supply leading to diarrheal disease.

Despite these programs, around 60% percent of the population remains without access to adequate sanitation. The vast majority of this unreached population is poor, rural inhabitants. By a simple estimate, India needs to ensure an additional 106 million people have access to toilets to meet the MDG target. Approximately one million people, most of them children, die due to sanitation-related diseases every year. Additionally, shame, indignity, and nuisance are inflicted upon millions of its’ people due to inadequate sanitation.

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Vox Populi

On a recent trip to Bhubaneswar and Cuttack, members of the Project Sammaan team from Quicksand and CFAR visited slums with the intention of recording a series of interviews with community members. These conversations are part of an initiative to build off of the user-experience theme that governed Potty Project in the past and guides Project Sammaan both today and going forward.

Whereas previous visits to these communities and interactions with those living within them were focused around gaining insights that will help drive specific aspects of Project Sammaan, these visits were intentionally devoid of such parameters. These conversations were intended to afford people a platform in which they could share thoughts and opinions on their daily lives, their communities, and their aspirations for the future.

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More than just the news…

As we work on the many different challenges of Project Sammaan, it is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about the motivations behind this endeavour. The primary goal is building toilets for those underserved by the existing urban sanitation systems in India, but we should not lose sight of Project Sammaan’s original intention as a pilot project.

The lives of the thousands of people served by the toilets we are building will doubtless be improved through these facilities. However, the toolkit that will share the insights of this project will lead to an improvement in the lives of millions more people as other organisations and governments use our learnings and documentation to build even more improved toilets and sanitation facilities.

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O&M, PMO

Operations & Maintenance (O&M) is one of the four pillars of innovation, primarily due to the fact that shortcomings and failures within this largely determines the success of the facilities.

Given the importance of this workstream, a great deal of time and effort has gone into understanding the current models that are employed, while exploring practical changes that can be made to operating and maintaining these facilities while improving the quality of life of the caretakers themselves, both through their perceived value and position within the communities they serve and by addressing unfair business practices that put an undue financial strain on them.

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CFAR’s Role in Project Sammaan

CFAR’s role in Project Sammaan is to actively engage in facilitating community interactions in the field for: social mapping of each slum, community engagement and dialogue during design and construction phases, and facility management training for community members to help ensure the endeavour’s sustainability.

Presently, we are working on developing a strategy and implementation action plan for community intervention. A communication framework was developed that identified the specific issues that might affect Project Sammaan at the community level, which included strengthening the capacity of staff on specific inputs needed for individual slums, and developing activity checklists for specific project deliverables. Apart from this, CFAR is supporting Quicksand and J-PAL when required at the community level for the project.

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Branding Workshop

While Project Sammaan is the project’s name, the sanitation facilities we design and build will carry their own brand identity.

It’s important to brand these sanitation facilities appropriately to ensure optimal adoption rates amongst end users in the communities, a feeling of professionalism in the people who run these facilities, and brand recall amongst stakeholders in the government and other organizations working in this sector to maximize its impact.

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Codesign Field Visit

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.

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