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Chipping away at the mountain of trash

New Delhi: As garbage piled up in the open spaces of Gurugram makes hashtags like #Kudagram trend on social media, a group of frustrated residents, including expats, of posh gated communities, have taken it upon themselves to remove trash from the streets every weekend. In Bengaluru, India's IT hub, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the founder of Biocon and a city resident, renewed the debate about garbage mismanagement with her viral post on X. This March, villagers blocked the garbage trucks from accessing a nearby landfill, claiming it contaminated their groundwater. This was not the first such blockade in what was once proudly referred to as the "garden" city of India. As waste mismanagement in Indian cities increasingly threatens public health and the environment, most residents still do not bother about the quantity or destination of the trash they discard. This mirrors the administrative apathy towards adopting sustainable practices aimed at reducing, reusing, recycling, and safely disposing of garbage. Given the well-recognised benefits of clean urban environments and the Union government's Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which has focused on improving sanitation in mission-mode for the past 11 years, only a few cities have meaningfully reformed their waste management systems, while the majority show only moderate or minimal progress. Indore was feted as India's cleanest city for seven consecutive years on the national Swachh Survekshan ranking launched in 2016. It now sits in the 'Super Swachh League' category of cleanest cities in the country. But long-time residents recall the time when the city used to get choked by foul air, garbage spillovers, and sewage backflows. Mayor Pushyamitra Bhargav says that the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, launched by the Centre in 2014, marked a turning point when the political and administrative leadership prioritised sanitation. Those who followed stayed on course. Indore's clean-up strategy focused on garbage segregation at source and ensuring it remained unmixed throughout the waste management cycle. "If you ask people to segregate trash, they expect it to be collected, transported, and processed accordingly. If not, they will give up," says Manish Singh, former municipal commissioner (2015-2018) of Indore. While the Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules-2016 mandated that all waste generators separate dry and wet garbage, most Indian cities have not enforced it because their waste management value chain does not support segregation throughout. Mixing waste compromises its quality for processing. Experts say washing soiled non-biodegradable items for recycling is costly and economically unviable. Mixing wet organic or food trash with domestic hazardous waste results in toxic compost, and unsorted trash can release pollutants in waste-to-energy incinerators. Conversely, efficient waste segregation can create valuable resources. It also ensures that used products are transformed into raw materials, which can then be reused into the production cycle, thereby reducing the load on natural resources. According to Indore Municipal Corporation, its bio-CNG plant generates ₹2.52 crore annually and fuels city buses. The two material recovery facilities for dry waste produce ₹1.43 crore, and a textile waste processing plant earns ₹1 lakh a month. Collection discipline As many as 98% of the 96,020 municipal wards across India that have reported data on the Swachh Bharat Mission dashboard practice door-to-door garbage collection, and 91% have segregation at source. "However, collection also has qualitative issues," a waste management expert pointed out. "You say it is 100%, but did that collection happen on time? If one misses the daily pickup, the garbage doesn't sit in the house until the next day. It is just chucked anywhere in the open." This explains the presence of stinking garbage dumps across Indian cities. Effective collection requires "a lot of granular planning and clockwork precision," adds Singh. Before launching the drive in Indore, all households were mapped, routes planned, and drivers trained to follow schedules. Also, removing local dumpsters is essential, making door-to-door collection the only option, so segregated garbage can be directly transported to processing facilities. Singh says that, if efficient, this can keep cities clean and deter littering. In Delhi, despite the plan to eliminate community dumpsters called dhalao by December 2024 and replace them with compactor stations, milk booths, and EV charging stations, they are still used for dumping trash. HT reported recently that this was because of gaps in door-to-door collection and fixed compactor transfer stations, which compress large waste volumes for transport, are still not adequate in number. Trash that stays put Segregation is not widely practised across Indian cities, resulting in recyclables being sorted from mixed waste at a later stage. Since the recycling sector is mainly informal, there is limited opportunity for proper cleaning, leading to most waste being dumped openly and contaminating land and water resources, explains Swati Singh Sambyal, a waste management expert. The selling price for recyclable plastic is so low that low-value items (including single-use items, plastic bags and multilayered plastic such as empty sachets) are not even picked up, adds Bharati Chaturvedi, founder and director of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group. Disposal of such discards falls under the 'extended producer's responsibility', which, under the SWM rules, requires the manufacturer to take the waste back, recycle it, or dispose of it. Sambyal says that while some initiatives, such as the India Plastics Pact (a collaborative business initiative), strengthen the industry's commitment towards circularity and reducing packaging waste, stricter compliance and regulatory action are required to meet the targets. Currently, not all producers, importers, and brand owners fall under the ambit of EPR. Silent sorters For years, the faceless, socially marginalised waste pickers have been informally doing the job of the citizenry and the municipal staff by sifting through and removing recyclables from dhalaos and dumpsites, reducing transportation costs and the burden on landfills. The MSW rules acknowledge their role and clearly define the procedure for engaging them more justly. Local bodies must register them, issue identity cards, improve working conditions, allocate space for material recovery, and pay a reasonable honorarium from generator user charges. However, many civic bodies have subcontracted doorstep collections to private concessionaires. Waste pickers also work in the same space but informally. The waste belongs to the concessionaire (which also controls access to transfer stations), making the waste picker an illegal entity, says Chaturvedi. However, with the right to recyclables, waste pickers are motivated to remove as much as possible, says Harshad Barde, director of SWaCH (Solid Waste Collection and Handling Pune Seva Cooperative Limited), India's first fully waste picker-owned cooperative authorised to provide municipal solid waste services in Pune since 2007. By giving SWaCH workers access to waste, social benefits, and payment for the service provided, Pune has achieved high levels of segregation with minimal behaviour change campaigns for segregation and enforcement. This translates to SWaCH waste-pickers recycling up to 35%, which is the highest diversion to recycling from source in the country, says Barde. Without a "formal employer-employee relationship", these workers have, in 2023-24, recovered more than 82,000 tonnes of recyclables and diverted over 80% of waste at the source, significantly reducing CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, apart from receiving ₹20 crore in user fees, a report by the Centre for Science and Environment titled 'Pathways to Inclusion of Waste Pickers' stated. Another potentially effective model, say experts, is Bengaluru's network of Dry Waste Collection Centres (DWCC), which evolved from experiments in the 1980s, and got a more formal structure in 2012 when the villages near the Mavallipura dumpsite on the city's outskirts blocked trucks carrying the city's untreated waste from being dumped in their backyards. After closing the landfill, the city was compelled to look at more decentralised models, including setting up collection centres for dry trash and bio-methane units to treat organic waste. In 2011, the Lok Adalat -- an alternative dispute resolution mechanism under the purview of the Legal Services Authorities Act -- directed the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) to enumerate informal waste workers and issue them identity cards. It also asked the civic corporation to earmark space for DWCC in all municipal wards. But even after a decade, problems persist. Segregation at the source is not fully enforced, adding to the pressure on DWCCs. Not all wards have DWCCs; some have been built but not transferred to waste pickers; others lack basic facilities. Many centres do not have weighing machines, and payments to drivers and vehicle rentals are delayed, says Pinky Chandran, founding member of the Solid Waste Management Roundtable (SWMRT) and trustee at Hasiru Dala, an organisation working on socio-economic inclusion of waste pickers. In Pune, SWaCH workers also have their share of problems. The PMC manages waste in 20% of the city. "While PMC continues to provide services in many middle and high-income neighbourhoods, slums and lower-income areas, which are difficult to service, have been handed over to us," says Barde. "Collecting user fees from low-income neighbourhoods is difficult, but not impossible if we have enforcement support. After home collection, trash is carted to feeder points and trucked to material recovery centres. However, data shows that 30% of vehicles are delayed over an hour daily, and 5% of feeder points remain unserviced. As a result, waste pickers wait, but vehicles don't arrive, leaving trash behind," he adds. Warped contracts Experts point to a counterintuitive practice: the 'tipping fee' payment model for private concessionaires or contractors. This model is institutionalised in large cities where waste collection, transportation, and processing are primarily privatised. Private players are paid by the volume they collect and bring to the processing facility or a landfill. While segregation reduces the volume, mixed waste, which is heavier, fetches a higher fee. Following reports of contractors hiding construction debris to increase the tonnage, Chennai adopted a service delivery model in 2017. The payment to contractors is based on evaluation against key performance indicators, including the amount of garbage diverted from landfills through composting and recycling. But it is not until waste is segregated at source and processed locally will the benefits of the new model be visible. Manage garbage locally Cities in Kerala have developed a decentralised model in which, according to the state government, 80% of the biodegradable waste generated by households is managed at the source, and the remaining 20% goes to community processing sites. With 77% of the waste being organic, this means a massive diversion from landfills and resource-heavy centralised processing plants. Kerala's model, too, was borne out of community protests. Much like in Bengaluru, villagers living near 13 landfill sites, including the Vilappilsala panchayat in Thiruvananthapuram and the Sarvodayapuram landfill in Alappuzha, refused to take trash from the city. This led to the administration closing the two sites, and decentralisation emerged as the most workable solution. The enforcement of India's first set of waste management rules in 2000 resulted in a centralised approach to waste management, as it focused more on collection and dumping. Almitra Patel, whose landmark Supreme Court case led to SWM Rules-2000, says she "regretted" that her achievement had been undermined by "politics and corruption." "The inherited system of payment-by-weight for secondary transport of trash (the tipping fee) ends up promoting and maximising the collection and dumping of waste," she says. "So, the cities invested in facilities, only to use those as dumping grounds, creating large trash mountains at the city's edges. Today, villages near these dumps suffer tremendously from polluted groundwater, foul odours, flies, and feral dogs. I regret it and am now an advocate for decentralised waste management." As a course correction, the revised 2016 SWM rules emphasised segregating wet and dry waste at source, collecting and processing it locally, and easing the waste burden on cities. In a step up, the draft SWM rules by the Union environment ministry, to be enforced soon, expand source segregation from three categories (biodegradable, non-biodegradable, and domestic hazardous waste) to four categories: wet, dry, sanitary, and special care waste. However, experts say rules are good as long as they are implemented in full, while warning that any attempt to centralise waste processing by sidelining the informal sector would derail reforms. "Also, the focus on EPR and waste-to-energy in the revised rules will require careful execution to avoid unintended consequences," says Sambyal. My waste, my responsibility Kerala's decentralised model of managing waste locally draws heavily from people's participation and an army of waste workers who are well integrated into the system. Waste segregation at the source is essential, and households are encouraged to use bio-composting bins to manage their organic waste. Similarly, aerobic composting units are in use for bulk generators. To handle inorganic waste, Kerala constituted the Haritha Karma Sena (HKS), an army of waste workers, mainly women from Kudumbashree, a state-run community network for poverty eradication. They collect non-biodegradable waste from homes for a user fee, mandated by law, says an official from Suchitwa Mission, the department of local self-government's technical unit for waste management. According to the state government, in the last one year, the 37,363-strong workforce has collected 140,000 tonnes of inorganic waste, which is stored in material collection facilities and handed over for recycling and processing via Clean Kerala Company, a government-run entity. Inorganic waste collection from homes increased from 47% in 2023 to 89% in 2025. Barde says Kerala's HKS is a sound model of engaging with informal workers. "The HKS has the state's backing to support its decisions, actions, and enforcement measures. Particularly, the decentralised infrastructure for collection, which puts the onus on waste generators, is part of the design of the system. In contrast, SWaCH in Pune is a cooperative established by the PMC but operates independently. This means that the PMC can distance itself from any issues, while SWaCH lacks the authority to make decisions or implement policy changes independently." However, the HKS still demands better logistical support and integration with scrap dealers and plugging the existing gaps in waste segregation at source. Also, Kerala has 93 urban local bodies and 44 legacy landfills, many located close to water bodies. In 2023, after a massive fire raged for days in the Brahmapuram landfill in Kochi, the high court sought remedial measures. Officials say biomining and remediation of these 44 dumpsites are underway. Of these, 20 landfills are being handled by the World Bank-funded Kerala Solid Waste Management Project. Divya S Iyer, the project director, says the work is likely to be completed by mid-next year, and the land reclaimed from this exercise will be utilised for building "scientific waste management facilities." Additionally, three regional "scientifically engineered" landfills across the state are being considered. Asked if this is a departure from the existing decentralised model, Iyer describes it as a "hybrid model." "There will be separate parcels of land to be allocated for these landfills, and they will be used only for inert objects, which don't interact with anything to become something else and are, therefore, not environmentally harmful. Also, the landfills will be designed as per the World Bank standards, which is extremely stringent, so there is no contamination of soil, no leachate, and the air quality standards are sufficiently maintained." For now, the state government is pleased with Kerala's scores on the national sanitation index. A year ago, not a single urban local body from the state made it to the top 1,000. This year, Kerala had 82, eight of which made it to the top 100 ranking. To maintain cleaner public places, cities impose fines of up to ₹5,000 for littering and ₹50,000 with possible imprisonment for violating waste management rules. This year alone, ₹5.5 crore has been collected in fines, including the headline-grabbing ₹25,000 fine on singer MG Sreekumar for dumping trash in Kochi backwaters. Paying for trashing However, not all cities have been willing to enforce fines. Most even shy away from charging a user fee to cover the cost of waste management services, even though SWM rules mandate a user charge. In June, the Delhi Municipal Corporation reversed its decision to combine a garbage fee with property tax and made it optional. Residents' groups and local politicians opposed the fee of ₹50-200 per month on residential properties and higher for commercial establishments, demanding that a uniform, efficient, and segregated waste collection system be put in place first. This is a chicken-and-egg situation, says a retired MCD official. "To provide better services, we need funds. Around ₹1,100-1,200 crore is spent annually on solid waste management, most of which goes into collection and transportation."

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