iic mission garima - october 2015 newsletter
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ISSUE 2 : SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2015 1
International Innovation Corps +Mission GarimaSeptember-October 2015
ISSUE 2 : SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2015 2
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.
ISSUE 2 : SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2015 3
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!
ISSUE 2 : SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2015 4
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
ISSUE 2 : SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2015 5
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
ISSUE 2 : SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2015 6
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
ISSUE 2 : SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2015 7
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