Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invests over Rs 37 crores in Project Sammaan

Research teams are identifying different ways to encourage toilet usage through community demand generation experiments and household-level pricing and habit-formation experiments

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested over Rs 37 crores for Project Sammaan, an initiative to eradicate the issue of open defecation in India. The initiative is being run by Dr Sharon Barnhardt, Director of the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) Nuffield – FLAME University and her research team. Dr Barnhardt leads ‘Project Sammaan’, an initiative run in partnership with MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the Bhubaneshwar and Cuttack Municipal Corporations, and several other institutions and academics.

Project Sammaan officially inaugurated two community toilet facilities in Cuttack on May 17, 2017 and is building 56 more. The inauguration ceremony was attended by members of the communities, Cuttack Municipal Corporation officials and Member of the Legislative Assembly, Debasis Samantray.

Dr Barnhardt is the lead Principal Investigator for the project, working closely with co-authors Judith Chevalier and Mushfiq Mobarak, both Professors of Economics at the Yale School of Management, Yale University. The research team will identify different ways to encourage toilet usage through community demand generation experiments and household-level pricing and habit-formation experiments.

The facilities where the research will take place have been designed with the end users’ experience in mind and include features like floating roofs that allow for natural light and ventilation, universal access stalls for the disabled and menstrual waste incinerators. Communities are electing Ward Sanitation Committees to oversee the facilities’ operations and maintenance. Community managers will appoint a care-taker who will collect real-time data on toilet usage with a bespoke tablet application during the first year of operations. To combat potential collective action problems, members of ‘Project Sammaan’ will closely monitor the toilets through official auditing and grievance redressal systems.

The CESS Nuffield – FLAME University Research Centre is a collaboration between Nuffield College, University of Oxford and FLAME University, the first and only such research centre in India. This unique collaboration, forged in October 2016, gives an opportunity for Oxford scholars to co-operate with the community of social scientists in India.