Most of India’s sanitation woes boil down to the same context, open defecation. Roughly 60% of India’s population defecates in the open and only 21% has reached rural sanitation coverage. Poor sanitation in India also affect the health of children and it results in malnutrition in most cases. Only 32% of households in India have their own toilets and due to a raising sanitation deficit in the country, there has been a gaping loss in GDP and this has also lead to increase in the disease burden of the country.
Swapnil Chaturvedi, a software engineer settled in USA, visited India after a four-year hiatus to his hometown Raipur, Chattisgarh, with his three-month-old daughter. The sanitation condition in the city overwhelmed him. Worst-hit areas were the urban slums and the government schools. He realised the fact that people defecate in the open since there is a burgeoning lack of toilets. One year down the line he came back to India, this time to build and toilets and revamp municipality toilets through his organisation Samagra.
From an engineer to The Poop Guy
Imagine your business card reading, “Poop Guy – I Love Shit”. Swapnil’s business cards read exactly the same. The motivation to work towards creating better sanitation possibilities in the country drove him towards taking the big leap, quit his successful career as an engineer and shifting his base back to India and start Samagra to address the issue at the local level.
When The Logical Indian spoke to Swapnil, he said, “The first time I worked to create a model in sanitation was when I was studying business in North-Western University, Chicago. Working for the project involved a lot of research and I got to know about the grass-root level problems faced by our fellow countrymen who aren’t as lucky as we are. Most of them don’t have access to toilets in their home.” He dropped out of his course in business studies only to come back to India and started Samagra.
The first model of intervention was to convert human excreta into electricity. He started working on finding a solution to sanitation problems and it was in late 2010 that he came back to India to start working in the social sector. “This shift was a big, drastic one, but it was the junoon in my head that made me strive to bring about a change in the sanitation scenario in the country,” Swapnil added. He said, “My experience taught me that education or any kind of special skill set has nothing to do with working in the social sector. All boils down to the fact how driven you are to bring about the change that you want to see”.
It took him four attempts to understand the problems faced by our fellow citizens at the grass-root level, in context to sanitation and to get a scale-able solution to deal with these problems. In 2012 and 2013 he invested money without taking the public behavioural aspect into account. His failures taught him a lot about problems people face and he even stayed in a slum for a period of six months to understand the lives of people there. “I wanted to find out what could be done so that people can get access to the essential life utilities,” said Swapnil. Pune helped them to get a very fresh perspective to solve the problem.
His first project was in Raipur and it was an in-home toilet model which failed to gain momentum but it contributed to his learning, by helping him assess the turnout of the project. Pune, on the other hand, taught him how to mitigate the challenges and how to create a scale-able intervention model. Samagra has created toilets which users would want to use and the paid users would get added advantages. Samagra has also taken up the responsibility of cleaning community toilets and revamping them with better facilities. These toilets have proper hygiene and ventilation system and are fitted with sanitation devices which cannot be vandalised. For his innovative approach to deal with problems related to sanitation in India, Swapnil has also received acclaim and recognition nationwide.
Samagra toilets being cleaned Challenges he faced and the road ahead
“Technical, human behavioural and challenges depending on the stakeholders are the kind of challenges which we face on a regular basis”, he said. Sanitation provisioning in an urban slum is difficult as you hardly have access to space and there are stakeholders like the community who uses it and local political parties. Local political parties often have vested interests and local municipal corporation and its workers are difficult to deal with. They hardly have well-defined roles and responsibilities.
Swapnil added, “People demand better facilities and if they don’t get it, they get very frustrated which means they are inclined to use better services.” Apart from this, there are cases of rampant vandalism and improper usage that Samagra has to deal with on a regular day to day basis. “The solution to these challenges can be achieved only through awareness and change in …
