A team of eight members from ITN-BUET visited MAWTS on 7 March 2020 at their Mirpur premise aiming to share knowledge, ideas and find collaboration opportunities on fecal sludge desludging and transportation options. MAWTS, an outstanding technical training institute to provide capacity building for the poor and rural youths, is also one of the pioneer organizations to promote safe fecal sludge management in the country. It produced one of the foremost locally fabricated desludging equipment in 1998 for sludge emptying and transportation. Since then, MAWTS has continued its commitment towards safe sanitation and is working on different technological aspects for promoting mechanical sludge emptying and transportation service.
The meeting was chaired by Mr. Dominic Dilu Peris, Director of MAWTS. They shared objective, vision and mission of the institute along with possible future collaboration options with ITN-BUET. Mr. Martin Pramanik, Marketing & Production Manager of MAWTS gave an overview of the equipment’s developed by MAWTS, challenges in production, marketing and after sales services of those products and possible solutions of those challenges.
Mr Alauddin Ahmed, Project Manager, ITN-BUET presented view, objectives and expectations of ITN-BUET team from the visit. ITN-BUET team shared thoughts on how to overcome those challenges what should be the R&D strategies for overall development of the products. In the discussion following issues were highlighted- regular training packages, operator SOP manual, dewatering device, after sale services, technological variation of desludging equipment’s.
ITN-BUET team visited the compound and MAWTS staffs demonstrated different desludging equipment, some of which they have recently development and how they operate the equipment. Technical idea was shared between MAWTS and ITN-BUET team regarding further improvement in terms of efficiency for the equipment and capacity of relevant stakeholders such as operators.
