Mr. Anand Jagtap (Ex. Officer on Special Duty, MCGM) is currently pursuing his Ph.D. from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. He has worked with more than 850 community-based organizations that run the community toilet blocks in slum areas of Mumbai. His talk on January 29th, 2020, focussed on the participatory approach developed for the successful operations of these blocks under the slum sanitation program.
He primarily presented a pictorial representation of slums in Mumbai and the facilities for sanitation infrastructure. He then explained the different categories of sanitation infrastructure present and their present coverage. In community toilet blocks, inadequate infrastructure, lack of water and electricity, improper operation and maintenance activities are some of the major causes of the discomfort of users, health hazards, and environmental degradation. He explained that this was due to a supply-driven approach of most schemes for constructing these toilet blocks. It was intriguing to know how these blocks are connected to the political scenario of a place and serve as vote banks in many locations.
He further explained that to overcome all these barriers, the slum sanitation program was initiated in the year of 1995 by the World bank. This was based on a demand-driven approach. In this approach, community participation was ensured in order to attain sustainable sanitation. This scheme aimed at improving the health and environmental conditions of the slum dwellers by providing basic services like water and electricity within the toilet block.
He further explained the implementation process of this scheme highlighting the partnership structure, design features, tender process, organizational distribution of responsibilities for running these toilet blocks He further showed examples of few successful community toilet blocks and elucidated the importance of having some social activity to enhance the lives of the local slum dwellers. In the successful blocks, most had a community hall for children’s classroom, library, gym, and vocational training centers. He explained that it was necessary to see the utility of toilet blocks beyond the primary purpose in order to involve people in its careful and sustainable use.
It was great to interact with him and participants loved asking questions on the role of these organizations for maintaining hygiene standards while providing these services to the mass. It was interesting to know about how people’s viewpoint plays an important role in making an engineering system successful in a developing world. This webinar was instrumental to illuminate the fact that engineering technologies and developments go hand in hand with the study of the user’s perceptions and demands in a particular location for effective implementation.