Collaboration

Tuesday was spent in a very productive day having collaborative meetings. Our morning meeting was between ReachOut Water Solutions, the Acara Institute, and members of the IIT Bombay facility including Dr. Anand B. Rao from the CTARA (Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas) group, Dr. Ravi Gudi, Dr. Sethi and students from our IIT Bombay counterpart class. This meeting was able to help the Acara Institute strengthen ties with IIT Bombay and helped begin to map out how the collaborative competition would work next year. CTARA is a very interesting research institution within IIT Bombay which engages students in research projects related to the technical needs of rural areas. ReachOut had the opportunity to present some of our early findings from our slum visits and discuss what impact our field visits had on the direction of our project and receive feedback and direction from the professors and students.

In the afternoon we had the pleasure of meeting with a Dr. A.S. Rao from the Government of India in the Department of Science and Technology, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. In this meeting their were also members of the IIT Bombay incubator group Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE). Both Dr. Rao and SINE were very interested in our program and were able to provide helpful and insightful feedback into some of the challenges we will be facing implementing a water program. However, both Dr. Rao and SINE offered their support as we move forward. This was very encouraging.

Back to Work in the Slums of Mumbai

Today we were back to work on the Slum Water Program after the day sight seeing yesterday. We spent the day with important "social engineers" from the BMC. The BMC, or the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, is the name of the municipality in charge of providing water and sanitation services, among others, to the residents of Mumbai. Over the past 4 months we have been working in cooperation with Mr. Anand Jagtap of the BMC's Mumbai Sewage and Disposal Program (MSDP) and Officer on Special Duty for the Slum Sanitation Program (SSP) in Mumbai to understand how the SSP has developed based on its unique demand-driven, community-based approach to sanitation provision. We hope the SSP will serve as a stepping stone for developing similarly managed, community-based water provision for slum communities. Mr. Jagtap has worked to establish the Slum Sanitation Program since it's initiation in 1995 and has seen hundreds of programs implemented in the last 15 years. Our team has gain valuable learning from him over the last several months, and most recently today in our visits to SSP installations.

We began the day meeting Mr. Jagtap and his colleagues at the MSDP headquarter office in Mumbai. We reviewed how the SSP works, from conception to implementation to more large scale development and function (top photo). We learned in detail how all parties, like the BMC, the community, the contractor, the NGO, etc., are involved. We then proceeded to visit three Slum Sanitation Program locations in various slums.



The first SSP was located next to a school and a communal area for festivals. The first and second floors were designated for toilets, while the third floor was both a management office and a roof top garden where the water tanks are located. The facility was very clean and well-managed. After speaking with the manager of the toilet block as well as a handful of community members, we moved on to the second SSP located in Dharavi, Mumbai and Asia's largest slum community. The SSP facility in Dharavi was also clean and pretty large-scale. Each SSP serves between 1,000-2,000+ community residents and pay-per-use users, and everyone pays for using the sanitation services. The most interesting part of the visit to the second SSP was the community-based organization (CBO) that manages the toilet block and represents the community. The CBO plays an instrumental role in maintaining a relationship between the BMC and community, and also provides other resources to the community. When we visited, a group of 10 women (middle photo) were taking English classes in the building next to the SSP. As seen in the photo, Erin Binder (Acara Institute's Executive Director) met with the women's group during our visit. On the second floor kids were taking a computer class. All SSP locations require a CBO to demand sanitation services from the BMC before the any SSP is constructed for the community. This community involvement and demand has played a key role in the development and success of the SSP. The final slum we visited was located in the Mumbai garbage dump, where the roads through the slum are made of piles of trash (bottom photo) and the houses are actually built on the old part of the dump. This slum was the most impoverished we've seen to date, but the SSP located within was comparable with the first two. Delegations interested in community sanitation programs from 57 nations have visited the slum, with representatives from places like Kenya to Japan. In a community with so little infrastructure and resources, it was great to see the SSP and to meet the CBO helping to provide quality of life resources to people in need. We enjoyed learning about the program from the manager, who lives on the second floor of the building with his family. We finished off our visits with a wrap up discussion with Mr. Jagtap at a local restaurant specializing in North Indian cuisine.

Overall, it was a great day and the visits to the SSP locations have really helped our team to understand how a Slum Water Program could fit into the existing framework for community based development projects in the slums of Mumbai. Most importantly, every community is extremely different. Therefore we realize the need to provide a dynamic water solution that can be adapted to each individual community. For instance, in the last community we visited, the slum is built on a garbage dump where many of the people are waste pickers. Other slums we have visited have been on steep hills or have had torn up roads. A system of water delivery must be tailored to each community in a way that makes sense for how the slum is structured and the community must play a large role in the development of their water solution. We believe a water program can work in many slum communities if the community is involved with developing the solution and the distribution and payment systems work for the users. We now will be working to determine the best way forward.

Gateway of India

Today we took a day off from our work schedule to do some tourism of the business and commercial districts of the city. Erin Binder of the Acara challenge joined us today for her first day in India. After seeing the Gateway of India, we were met by U of MN Acara Challenge participant, and Mumbai resident Neel Kulkarni. Neel took us around the various sites of Mumbai from the beach where we sampled Indian cool treats to the sites of the terrorist attacks at the Taj and Oberoi Trident hotels. We also took in a national art gallery, visited the beautiful Victoria Terminal (VT) train station, and stopped for a photo opportunity outside the Bombay Municipal Cooperation Building. We finished up the day by doing some gift shopping at the Bombay Store, had a nice iced coffee drink at Coffee Day, and took a fascinating train ride home through the city.

Saturday in Mumbai

Today started with a change of scenery. We moved from the Rodas Hotel, where we stayed the first 3 nights, to the student housing at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. After settling in to our new rooms we met with Dr. Sethi from the Center for Environmental Science and Engineering and toured his labs. It was great to learn about some of the environmental research going on here from monitoring of air quality throughout India to experimenting with gasifiers to obtain energy from biomass.

After lunch in the mess hall at our hostel, we spent a few hours relaxing before taking off for our second slum visit. This time we visited a slum a bit farther from campus and were guided by two men who live in the community. Again we spoke with several community residents about their water situation. In this slum, water runs from 5:30-9:30pm every night and people pay for all the water coming into the slum. It consisted of permanent housing. People pay the equivalent of about $3 per month per family for water. The largest problems were that the pipes are old at 25 years and that often the pipes run through the sewer drains. We frequently saw pipes that were leaking water, which means that dirty water can also get into the water pipes. All the people we spoke with boil water only during monsoon (which starts in ~1 week) since many more of the pipes become submerged in contaminated sewage water. There are few sewage lines in these communities, instead just open sewer drains.

After returning from the slum visit, we returned to the hostel, played some ping pong, and headed out for a night in Mumbai. We took "autos," or auto rickshaws, to a nice restaurant not far from campus where we enjoyed ourselves for a few hours. Then it was back to the hostel for a restless night of sleep in our steamy dorms.

Slum Visit

Slum Visit

Today began with a morning meeting with our contact from the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, Mr. Anand Jugtap. He was very informative with insights into the Slum Sanitation Program and about the implementation of a water program in general. He is going to be setting up a tour of Slum Sanitation facilities on Monday, meetings with a slum water cooperative on Wednesday and a group meeting with the community based organizations on Friday. He will be helping us refine our ideas and move our program forward.

We also had our first tour of a slum community during the time period when water runs throughout the city of Mumbai, between 1-4pm. This is the only time period water runs through the municipal lines. It was very interesting to see firsthand some of the conditions that we had been reading about the past six months. Even within the same community, people obtain water in a variety of ways. Some people own municipal taps, which are usually located in the narrow walk ways/streets between homes. Some buy water from neighbors. Some take water from public taps and carry it longer distances to their homes. There were also a few wells, though they were not in use. In general, people do receive about 30-50L of water per capita per day. During our community visit, it was most useful to learn from the community members about their water use, treatment, and problems. We met with community members and were able to see the problems with the water distribution system and learn about how they currently obtain water. From the visit, we saw a lot and hope to use our observations and informal discussions to further our ideas.

Tomorrow we will be moving onto the IIT Bombay campus and making more visits to two other slum communities in Mumbai.

First day

Today completes are first full day in India. The morning started out by meeting a Mr. Gagan Goyle. He started his first business while in his third year of university at IIT Bombay. He now runs a successful startup business that works to educate students in real life science and engineering through providing curriculum and training and in the field of robotics. He gave us good insight into what it takes to start a successful business.

After the morning meeting and some time attempting to sort out phone service, we had the privilege of meeting our IIT Bombay counterparts for the first time. We gave the presentation for our water solution and received critical feedback from the students on our ideas. We also had the pleasure of meeting with the community representatives that had been assisting the IIT Bombay students with their ground research. After the critique session, we organized our first field trip into the slums.

Tomorrow we will be traveling into slums near IIT Bombay campus to perform our first round of field research. We hope to learn more about how our program can be adapted to a slum setting. We will be working with two students from IIT Bombay and the community representative. We will also be meeting with Mr Jugtap, our contact at the municipality of greater Mumbai.

Arrived in Mumbai!

In a little under a day of travel, the ReachOut team arrived safely in Mumbai. We caught some lovely views of the city as we flew in and saw some of the telltale Mumbai landmarks. After a slightly hair-raising taxicab journey through a vast array of auto-rickshaws, bikes, trucks and other taxi cabs all jockeying for a few inches of road available, we arrived in our hotel safe and sound. Tomorrow we will be getting acclimatized to the city and meeting our IIT Bombay counterparts in person for the first time.