Bhubaneswar, July 9: The Bhubaneswar Municipality Corporation (BMC) is launching a pilot project to upgrade slums in Bhubaneswar.

The Bhubaneswar slum upgrade pilot project intends to improve the quality of services to slum areas, especially by providing drinking water and sewerage facilities and lead to improvement of health standards.

Bhubaneswar has 377 slums — with 60,000 households and 3.08 lakh people. Most slums lack access to basic municipal services and housing. This affects the health of slum dwellers and of those living in close proximity. Only one third of the slum dwellers get water from pipes through public stand posts. The rest use handpumps or tubewells. Less than one fifth of the slums have access to household toilets and only one tenth have access to community toilets.

The pilot is proposed to upgrade seven settlements in Bhubaneswar. The first phase of the project has already begun at Gyannagar slum in the city. The project will provide water supply connections to homes from the city network. Each house, connected to the network, will have at least two taps — in the house and the toilet. Each household will have an individual toilet connected to the city sewerage network.

The project is being implemented by BISWA, a micro-finance NGO with the technical support from USAID FIRE (D) and financial support from Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF), in active partnership with the Housing & Urban Development Department. While MSDF will finance the augmentation of the city water supply and sewerage networks to be laid along the streets, BISWA will assist the poor families through microfinance to pay for the internal work of the house connections as well as the connection costs.

Based on the success of the slum upgrade project, the BMC will prepare a “Citywide Slum Upgrading Strategy”, said mayor Ananta Narayan Jena.

“This will aim at providing a framework of action and sustainable solutions for slum development across the city. The strategy will recommend new norms for service delivery standards for slums; identify and reform actions for mainstreaming slums into city systems,” said BISWA chairman K.C. Mallick.