IIC Mission Garima - October 2015 Newsletter

ISSUE 2 : SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2015 1

International Innovation Corps +Mission GarimaSeptember-October 2015


Mission Garima, a collaborative project between Tata Trusts and the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), aims to eliminate unsafe, unhygienic, and undignified practices in urban sanitation work throughout Mumbai. The initiative focuses on five key objectives: improved health services for workers, better occupational safety practices, more effective infrastructure and processes for solid waste management (SWM), more user-friendly equipment and technology, and a robust communications campaign that will mobilize local communities in support of the Mission.

Mumbai’s L ward, which encompasses much of the neighborhood of Kurla, will serve as Mission Garima’s pilot ward. Process improvements successful in L ward will then be replicated and scaled to other wards throughout the city.

The International Innovation Corps (IIC) team brings together a truly interdisciplinary group of creative and analytical individuals committed to supporting Mission Garima’s objectives. Our experiences range from designing urban cities to working in emergency rooms and the Government of Bihar to producing movies and documentaries. The team is committed to thoroughly analyzing and evaluating current practices in Kurla’s SWM system in order to work hand-in-hand with both Tata Trusts and the MCGM in identifying and piloting innovative, yet practical and scalable, interventions.


A S I N G L E F O C U S

Our team has come a long way since August 2015. We began with five work

streams, little direction, and no defined commitments, and here we stand with

three work streams, a fairly clear direction, and at least two major deliverables.

Our focus on the sanitation worker, however, has remained steady, and is still the

backbone of everything we do. As a team that is actively trying to incorporate

design thinking and participant inclusion into our methods, we remain committed

to fully understanding the worker both as a sanitation worker and, well, a human

being. We have understood that this is where the IIC-MG team truly brings value,

as senior-level administrative officials hardly have the time or capacity to

understand workers as deeply as our team has. Our aspiration is to introduce a sanitation worker-centered approach to infrastructure and policy-making in a city that is ordinarily governed top down.

Last month, with the help of Tata Trusts and the MCGM, we narrowed down our

work streams into three categories:

WASTE SEPARATION FACILITY IMPROVEMENT CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT

We identified one specific project within the facility improvement work stream

thanks to our chowki co-design sessions. Another project has just begun this month,

after weeks of observing waste management and trash collectors at local

cooperative housing societies.

Please read on to learn more!


c h a i a n d b i s c u i t s :E X P E R I M E N T S I N F O O D C O O P E R AT I V E S

In its effort to improve the working conditions of urban

sanitation, we have created a program titled Aamacha

Aahar - Aamache Poshan (आमचा आहार, आमचा पोषण). The

program encompasses following three sub-goals:

Affordable foodNutritional value

Decentralized management and decision making

During our co-design sessions, the MCGM workers ex-

pressed a need for basic healthy food facilities. The idea

emerged from the fact that many of them leave their home

before dawn for an early morning shift and work on an

empty stomach.

Under the program, we are working towards creating sus-

tainable food facilities that empower workers at the chowki

level to ascertain their food requirements based on their

affordability, time availability and nutritional requirements.

On October 2015, a joint committee of 5 members was formed in one of the Kurla chowkis in

Nehru Nagar. Women actively took part in the discussion and as a result, the committee

compromises of 2 female and 3 male members. The Kurla ward officer is excited with the idea of

providing food facilities to workers and organized a one-day orientation session for all the workers

at the chowki.

We are regularly engaging with the workers; this includes reaching the chowki at 6:30 am daily

and understanding their thoughts and apprehensions on the food facilities. Further, the team and

members of the committee have identified and visited 5 vendors that can act as a single window

vendor for most of the food requirements.

The workers brainstormed amongst themselves about the pros and cons of all the vendors and

selected the one who has capacity to scale up the operation. Finally, as a start, tea and biscuits will

be served (at a lesser rate) to workers at early morning hours in the coming month of November.

One of our co-design sessions

Formation of workers’ committee

Food testing at a local outlet


H O W E A R T H A N D M A R S C A N ‘ N U D G E ’ P E O P L E TO S E PA R AT E W A ST E

Changing the long-held habits of apartment res-

idents in Mumbai felt like an extremely daunting

task for the team. However, with much

cooperation from one Mumbai apartment’s

managers and waste collectors, we launched a

30-day waste separation challenge that plays

on several behavioral principles, including im-

mediate feedback, competition, social norms,

and a reward system. Beginning on November

1, 2015, each household received a calendar

which will serve as a “waste separation log.”

When a trash collector receives mixed waste

from a household, he places a sticker of Mars

on the calendar, and if he receives separated

waste, he places a sticker of Earth.

The apartment consists of four wings; two will

receive monetary rewards while the two other

wings will receive non-monetary praise and

acknowledgement. Additionally, two wings have

individual household calendars while two wings

have a floor-wise calendar.

With all four wings, we are testing the following

hypotheses:

1. If people receive immediate feedback on their actions with the stickers, they will be more aware of the consequences of their actions, and separate more.

2. If people are put into friendly compe-tition with each other, they will be more inclined to separate in order to perform “better” than others.

As with any effort to change the status quo,

there have been multiple logistical issues we

are trying to iron out, but so far responses from

residents have been overwhelmingly positive. If

this pilot is successful, it will be the beginning of

a long journey to scale these habits to the rest

of Mumbai.

An educational card sort game in action Children line up to “compete” A calendar logs residents’ performance

Mixed Waste Separated Waste


Explaining the session to women workers at the Jari Mari chowki Workers rank chowki components

The pitfalls of bringing an international team to

work on a development issue unique to a locality

were not lost on our team. Tasked with improving

the infrastructure of chowkis of L ward conservan-

cy workers, we sought to solicit our recommen-

dations for chowki alterations from the workers

themselves. Inspired by the methodology of

design firms like Quicksand and IDEO, our team

devised a number of “co-design sessions” with

the workers. In these

sessions, we ask: how might we improve your working space?

The initial structure for

the co-design sessions

involved dividing the

workers into groups

and having each partic-

ipate in a “card sort” activity as a group. For this,

the team prepared cards that each depicted a

basic amenities - a picture of a fan, a bench, a sink

to denote water supply, etc. By having the work-

ers place these cards in order based on what they

perceived as most important, we reasoned that

the workers’ priorities would be revealed.

We adapted this later on, as space constraints led

us to change from sorting cards to ranking ameni-

ties on printed sheets. Our goal was to learn what

constitutes an “ideal chowki”, but our model had

a few persistent problems. For instance, offering

too much freedom to choose amenities during

these sessions led to unrealistic wish lists being

compiled by the workers - one worker demand-

ed that housing be provided for free to his entire

family.

Hence, we are planning

to continue tweaking our

co-design sessions as we

progress. One possible

method may be to assign

monetary values to differ-

ent components and ask

workers to “spend” a lim-

ited amount of money on components they deem

most important. Another may be by assigning

Rhythm, our architect, to sit alongside the workers

as we ask them about ideal layouts for a chowki

and draw up their ideas into a concept model for

their consideration.

anatomy of a CO-DESIGN SESSION

A worker shares her ideas on personal protective equipment


C O N C LU S I O NIf there is one thing we have learned in these two months, it’s that implementation is a

messy and unpredictable process. No matter how much we try to plan in advance, there

will always be hiccups along the way. For this reason our close relationships with

stakeholders - waste collectors, sanitation workers, junior overseers, etc - are crucial. Good

relationships ensure a level of trust without which our interventions - and any tweaks we

make - would be impossible to execute smoothly and quickly. We are thus very thankful

for all those who have cooperated with us in the past two months, and we hope that these

relationships continue as we progress and scale.

Special ThanksSneha Dicholkar, Tata Trusts

Manisha Bhinge, Tata Trusts

Prashant Sapkale, MCGM

Anand Jagtap, MCGM

Sambhaji Jadhav, MCGM

Divya Viswanathan, IDEO

Dr. Ronita Bardhan, IIT Bombay

Dr. Anjali Sastry, MIT

Kashish Pal, Sampurn(e)arth

Rajesh, Sampurn(e)arth

Workers at Nehru Nagar, Brahmawadi, and

Jari Mari Chowkis

Jigar Patel, Surat Municipal Corporation

Vishal Rajpal, Sai Deep II CHS

Ar. Surbhi Pandit, M. Des CEPT

Somya Sethuraman

Contact UsWe would love to hear from you! Visit our website at iic-missiongarima.strikingly.com or

email us at [email protected] with any comments or ideas.

All views expressed in this newsletter belong to the IIC Mission Garima Team. These views are not necessarily shared by the International Innovation Corps program, Tata Trusts, MCGM, or the University of Chicago.

ISSUE 2 : SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2015 8International Innovation Corps +

Mission GarimaSeptember-October 2015

Documents

IIC Mission Garima - October 2015 Newsletter