A Designer’s Perspective on Sammaan

I am part of the design team and coordinate a lot of Quicksand’s input with the architecture team at Anagram Architects (AA). This includes feedback on designs, coordination of various submissions to the BMC and CMC, and managing updates to the same. I also assist in overall project management, while coordinating inputs to J-PAL on several aspects of software.

A typical day for me consists of several phone calls with Siva and AA and other partners to facilitate various aspects of the project. It also involves writing a few emails about design perspectives to share with partners, as well as writing for, and reviewing, various communication deliverables on the project.

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The Future of Sanitation in India

With an aspiring and young population, there is a growing demand from the citizens and government officials alike to provide quality basic services like sanitation. India is rapidly urbanizing and this is putting a huge strain on the existing sanitation facilities, especially in urban slums.

The future of sanitation in India involves making a paradigm shift in thinking and leapfrogging in creating sanitation infrastructure like toilets and supporting sewerage systems. This requires driving initiatives like Project Sammaan and scaling them up rapidly to benefit millions of Indians who don’t have access to toilets.

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Sammaan and India’s Future

The future of sanitation in urban slums in India will continue to be a challenge. While government policy clearly mandates individual housing for slum-dwellers in the future, it clearly is a huge challenge that will probably take eons to take shape, due to ever-increasing patterns of migration within the country. Community sanitation has forever been neglected as an area of focus for policy and innovation, while it continues to be the only real alternative to several people living in urban slums in India. Because of this, it needs single-minded focus both from policymakers as well as stakeholders in the sector to ensure that there can be sustainable and well-designed solutions.

Project Sammaan should surely make an impact on thousands of lives in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack. But I also hope that, through this “experiment”, we will be able to create a model for replicable innovation that can be adapted to various contexts and can bring better sanitation to the lives of slum-dwellers elsewhere as well.

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Building Momentum

These are early days still to claim success but we may have finally managed to move the project forward through a small but extremely important milestone – the tendering of public toilets in Bhubaneshwar. The technical sanction and Public Health standing committee approvals are in place and the tender documents await the administrative sanction before they are floated on the e-tendering platform of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation.

Like I said, this is a small but extremely important milestone for the project consortium, and here’s why.

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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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Four Pillars of Innovation

Potty Project research led to insights around opportunities to improve sanitation service delivery and, consequently, end-user perceptions around sanitary practices. These learnings were cased in four “pillars of innovation”: Operations & Maintenance, Branding Communications, Architectural Infrastructure, and Business Models.

1. O&M

Community sanitation facilities are in an ever-deteriorating physical state with derelict toilet hardware, broken doors or tiles, and accumulating layers of filth seeming an inevitable end for most. Overcoming people’s perceptions around participation in cleaning and maintaining these toilets will be a key challenge.

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Project Partner Profile: CTRAN

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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Sewage Issue Primer

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.

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Sammaan Toolkit Brainstorming

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.

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Recruiting for Research Sessions

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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