“Poop Guy - I love shit”, reads Swapnil Chaturvedi’s business card. In March 2013, along with his wife Tania, he founded Samagra Sanitation - a hybrid social enterprise entity that has both a for-profit (Samagra Waste Management Pvt. Ltd.) and non-profit (Samagra Empowerment Foundation) arm working at the intersection of design, technology and behavioural science to tackle the issue of open defecation.
Samagra has partnered with the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) to redesign and refurbish community toilets used by slum residents. They focus on ventilation and lighting, user experience and also make latrines accessible to the elderly and the differently-abled. Apart from this, they rework on the plumbing so that water is available for flushing, cleaning and washing hands.
Addressing the issue
Samagra operates in three urban slums - Ramnagar in Warje Malwadi, Nehrunagar Vasahat and Shrawandhara - and looks after six communal toilet blocks. That’s 128 toilet seats and 4,300 daily users, of which 2,098 are young girls and women. To use Samagra’s toilets, slum-dwellers pay a monthly fee of Rs. 75 per family. They receive an ID card, which can be used at any Samagra toilet, any number of times. The toilets are managed as Samagra franchises by individuals from low-income communities, which also include three Samagra Sanyoginis (local women), who get 100 percent of the revenue collected, which they use for cleaning and maintaining the toilets through a team of trained cleaners.
“We are adding one new communal toilet block every month, that translates to 1,200 monthly users, with half of them being women, and plan to influence the lives of at least 25,000 users in 25 toilet block locations by mid-2015,” says Chaturvedi. The scourge of open defecation that Chaturvedi aims to tackle is multi-layered - of the one billion people world over who defecate in the open, 600 million are in India, according to United Nations figures.
Building a toilet for all the 123 million households in India that lack one, would cost Rs. 2.56 trillion (little more than the Rs. 2.4 trillion India loses every year owing to poor sanitation, in terms of deaths and diseases; treating contaminated drinking water, welfare losses; loss in tourism; etc), which is approximately one-sixth of the government expenditure in 2012-13. But, solving India’s public defecation problem is not going to be eliminated by just throwing money at the problem. A study conducted by the Research Institute for Compassionate Economics (R.I.C.E) in five Indian states and published in June, found that 40 percent of households had at least one member who continued to defecate in the open in spite of having access to a working latrine at home. What is needed is an effort to change the way people use toilets, and the way they think about them—they need to see usage of toilets as being good for them.
Applying the problem
Chaturvedi recognised this and structured Samagra as an agent of behavioural change with user-friendly toilet design and a unique ‘LooRewards’ loyalty programme. “We have stopped asking the question of why people don’t use toilets. Instead, we focus on why they should. And, that is why we believe that behaviour change is key to open defecation,” explains Chaturvedi. The LooRewards platform uses community toilets as channels of user engagement to promote hygienic behaviour. It does this by rewarding the slum residents for using toilets regularly, on-time payment and performing tasks like washing of hands. For example, one of the rewards is a 15% discount on low-cost sanitary napkins. To take forward this positive rub-off, Samagra has tied up with the State Bank of India to provide banking services at toilets, where users can open accounts.
Chaturvedi, who worked in the US from 2001 until 2009, left his cushy job as a software engineer and enrolled in a master’s in design and management course in Northwestern University, Illinois, to help him embark on a new career in social change. He researched sanitation issues affecting the urban poor in developing countries and began working on design and business models that could be applicable to India.
“Previous experiments taught us that context is important while designing solutions. It is critical to understand the pain point and the experiments helped in developing the LooRewards model,” he says. In June 2013, they signed a partnership with the PMC to redesign and operate the first of the toilet blocks. According to Chaturvedi, vandalism has been reduced by 85%, usage increased by 50% and fee collection jumped by over 500%. Samagra’s community toilets become self-sustainable in six months. In 2013-14, they clocked close to Rs. 3 lakh in revenue. When Chaturvedi started out in 2010, he wanted to sign on 3 million users by 2015. Now, he is happy adding monthly users in the thousands.
Source: Mint Live