Why is it important
To ensure hygienic and affordable public toilet facilities (quality infrastructure and effective service delivery) for all citizens, cities have to develop realistic and demand-oriented citywide public toilet strategies and ensure their effective implementation through standardized tools such as action plans and Detailed Project Reports (DPR). While the action plan provides a bird’s eye view of the citywide actions, DPRs provide micro-level insights of the specific projects or project packages with a view to finance and implement them.
Contents
How to go about it
The National Urban Sanitation Policy (NUSP) prescribes various planning tools to ensure the elimination of open defecation by providing equitable and efficient access to public and community toilets and through sustained awareness efforts. As a first step, state governments and urban local bodies are required to develop State Sanitation Strategies (SSS) and City Sanitation Plans (CSP) to identify problem areas and define sanitation goals and strategies at the state, city and project level. With the overall strategy and action plan in place, cities are to use Detailed Project Reports (DPR) to understand and plan individual public toilet projects or project packages. The DPRs’ implementation should be guided and monitored by the annual action plan.
Detailed Project Report (DPR)
A DPR is a micro planning tool that typically provides the project rational, summary, user specifications, engineering designs of main and support infrastructure, as well as technical and financial aspects including financial sustainability. DPRs need to be developed for every project site.
DPR components
1) Background and context to DPR
- Footfall categorization to provide an idea of the size of the project, plausible demand characteristics, and whether the project would be able to meet the CAPEX and OMEX requirements.
- Planning & construction norms and designs: Existing and envisioned norms need to be clearly stated to ensure that the overall design aspects (units and construction limitations) are clearly understood and agreed upon. Some support schemes require scheme-specific rather than universal standards.
- CAPEX & OMEX template is a checklist of items to be used while preparing cost estimates for construction or installation (guidelines developed based on best practices in the sector).
2) Detailed Project Report of Individual project site or project packages of project sites
- Project Summary: Abstract to provide a snapshot of the project; often together with an action plan.
- Project Rationale provides the logic of why the project is important in the overall city wide context, location specifications, the problems to be addressed, the project’s uniqueness and quantification of envisioned benefits.
- User Profile provides a snapshot of the target users, their geographical spread, insights on usage timings and respective user perception survey recommendations. It also summarizes the analysis of land use around the PT location (demand); results from micro-level user surveys and focus group discussions on design requirements (e.g. different operational models in slums and tourist locations).
- Technical Review outlines the physical site condition (detailed engineering design), boundary conditions and design specifications as well as available infrastructure support.
- Proposed Technical Design provides a detailed analysis of the component units to be engineered (rehabilitation or new construction), assumptions on the structural designing and system functionality, detailed engineering designs (plans, elevations, sections as applicable) and detailed cost estimates that are detailed enough to use in the tender documents.
- Overall Layout provides an understanding of how the project could look (project visualization); often used for dissemination and discussions.
- Financial Analysis: Project feasibility (IRR & Net Present Values), considering estimated demand, project cost, O&M costs, concession period, unit rates.
- Demand Assumptions discuss the expected increase in footfall over the design period, issues pertaining to capacity utilization (rehabilitation) and optimization of structure components.
- Cost Estimates: Detailed item-wise engineering estimates of all project aspects including support infrastructure.
- Financial Assumptions related to construction of the asset, operation and maintenance, user charges and their expected increase, existing debt, annual escalations, interest rates, etc.
- Financial Projections verify the project viability against maintenance contracts or BOT projects, under the given assumptions detailed earlier. The operational and business model development section of the project structuring provides a more detailed financial analysis, relevant for the project’s structuring and contract documents.
- Recommendations summarize the project viability (technical & financial).
Action plan
An action plan helps to break down long-term goals into short- and medium-term goals and activities to guide the implementation of the DPR. This should include assessments, preparing detailed planning reports (DPRs), capacity building, awareness raising, etc. and be supplemented by institutional measures to facilitate conducive framework conditions (i.e. modifying regulatory framework), support institutionalization and the up-scaling of sanitation-related processes and activities.
The activities, milestones, outputs and objectives as defined under the DPR and corresponding action plan should be integrated into the monitoring framework to ensure timely implementation and corrective measures as and when required (Monitoring Framework).
Application On Ground
Tirupati
In line with the overall sanitation action plan, a model framework for Detailed Project Reports (DPR) including design, implementation and maintenance was developed. DPRs including site assessment, draft technical designs, cost estimates and financial operating plans for 5 selected locations were prepared. The framework can be used by other cities to guide their DPR preparation.
Shimla
The city followed Tirupati’s DPR Framework to prepare the PT rehabilitation DPR under the ROMT contract.
