Bridging the Gap

Project Sammaan is a highly innovative and demanding project, and one of the major concerns involves dealing with government policies and process. As one of the Interface Managers, my major responsibilities revolve around acting as a bridge between the Project Sammaan team and the government partners. I am also responsible for weighing in on decisions, both large and small, in such a way that risk is controlled and uncertainty minimised for the project.

My day-to-day activities include risk assessment, representing the project’s interests, enhancing relationships between the government and non-government partners, and maintaining (more…)

A Tale of Two Cities

We have written extensively about the challenges that have been faced over the past 2+ years working on Project Sammaan. Whether it’s managing the efforts and interests of multiple stakeholders, revising architectural drawings based on ground realities, navigating the complexities of working with urban local bodies in India, or “simply” keeping the initiative within its budget, the hurdles have been many, and significant.

One additional challenge that we’ve been remiss in discussing, though, involves accounting for the different working styles and protocols of the partners based in the pilot cities and those based elsewhere. As one of the only foreigners working on the project, and in the Indian context for the first time, adjusting to different working styles was a given. However, I was largely unprepared for just how divergent, even seemingly antithetical, the office dynamics can be from one city to the next.

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Ensuring Sammaan’s Construction

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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Managing Sammaan

It has been nearly 4 months since I took over as project manager of Sammaan. The timing of this threw me head first into the hardware tendering process and this milestone has dominated a majority of my time until now, as we prepare for the release of the final pending tenders: the 60 community toilets in Bhubaneswar. This milestone should be achieved by the end of February if all goes as it is currently planned.

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Tendering Update

The tender process has been long, tedious, and frustrating, but has also provided incredible insights into working with the government in implementing a project as unique and with such a scale as Sammaan, and the end is in sight. Much has been written about the tender in both this monthly newsletter and the project blog, but it is certainly a milestone worthy of such attention.

The feelings of elation shared by many partners following the tender release of the Public Toilets in Bhubaneswar were short-lived as the focus shifted to the Community Toilets, particularly the sites in Cuttack. Unlike the process that brought about the PT tender release in Bhubaneswar and is being followed for the Community Toilets there, in which the facilities are split into separate batches with total costs below the 3 crore threshold that permits the city municipalities to provide technical sanction and, therefore, release the tender, the total tender package of 32 facilities for nearly 8 crore needs to be released in Cuttack.

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Lessons from Sammaan

I spent the past 20 months with Sammaan both as a full-time project manager and a part-time consultant, and have just disengaged from the initiative.

This time has helped me to understand the challenges in implementing large-scale innovations in government organisations while getting the firsthand experience of looking at the state of sanitation facilities in Indian slums.

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Workstream Activities: Week of 11/18/13

Last week we were able to get the Public Toilet tender released in Bhubaneswar which allowed us to shift the focus to the Community Toilets in both pilot cities. The municipal corporations of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack require an incredible amount of documentation to push the tender process forward: over 2,500 pages of materials were submitted to the CMC and nearly double that amount will be submitted to the BMC this week. (We’ve assembled individual booklets for each of the 92 Community Toilets across both cities; Arkitechno has taken the lead in this with a lot of support coming from Anagram Architects).
The CMC engineering department is literally signing off on every single page of these booklets before sending them to the Chief Engineer based here in Bhubaneswar. Once the Chief Engineer reviews and approves these, we will get the technical sanction and, according to the Cuttack City Engineer, the tender will immediately be released.
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Public Toilet Tender Released!

We have achieved quite a milestone with Project Sammaan: the tender for the Public Toilets in Bhubaneswar has been released! This is a big step forward for the project and one that has taken the combined efforts of virtually all team members to accomplish.

One of the aspects of Sammaan that initially had team members so excited about the project was its innovative approach to addressing open-defecation, generally, and fixing the urban slum sanitation facility model, specifically. The layers of innovation cover everything from the design of the physical infrastructure to the business models and demand-generation activities employed to ensure increased, and sustained, adoption rates amongst users.

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Workstream Activities: Week of 11/11/13

When we first launched this blog, we provided weekly recaps of project-related activities in a series of posts called “Week That Was”. The thinking behind this type of reportage was two-fold: to provide a running, real-time catalogue of events as they happen and to be as transparent as possible in sharing our work as it unfolds.

We shifted away from this type of writing in the interest of sharing more thoughtful, reflective pieces about learnings from the project and individual partner experiences with it. However, given the call for greater communication from all of the partners, we’re reinstating these updates. The hope is that it will augment the experience for visitor’s to this site such that all audiences, from casual observers to invested project stakeholders, will glean deeper and richer knowledge about the Sammaan initiative.

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New Project Manager

There has been an exciting new development with Project Sammaan. Siva Cotipalli has disengaged from the initiative due to other, more pressing professional considerations and I have taken over his responsibilities as project manager.

The change comes at a fairly critical juncture in Sammaan as we continue working towards the release of the tender for the Public Toilets in Bhubaneswar and securing the technical sanctions for the Community Toilets in both Cuttack and Bhubaneswar.

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