Every day, urban India generates more than 200,000 tons of municipal waste at a minimum 300 gram per capita per day, and anticipated to catch up with developed countries at 600 gram or more by 2020. Some cities have already crossed 500 grams per capita daily, of which 85% is unceremoniously dumped without processing and treatment in open dumps, including the Ganga, Yamuna, Brahmaputra and many more rivers and seas. This 85% of open dumping and burning causes public health hazard, deteriorates the environment and causes climate change.
Near 6% of GHG (Green House Gas) emission happens due to open dumping and burning of mixed waste. Nearly 15% of this waste is recovered by a green army of informal sector recyclers numbering more than one million today across the country, called waste pickers or rag-pickers. In most megacities, this green army of recyclers is despised, threatened, arrested, harassed by our municipal system for recovering waste from road side, containers and open dumps, and they remain largely untapped of their potential in mainstreaming them in waste management and recycling. They save more than one million US$ every day or around (400 USD a year) for municipalities, and create recycling business opportunities of 8-10 million dollars every day. If the MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) Rules, 2016, are implemented in letter and spirit, it has the potential to create more than nearly one million sustainable jobs in door to door collection and recycling chain.
Corruption at the core
So, if our municipalities have enough resources and technological solutions available in the country, why is the situation going from bad to worse with every passing day? Here are the reasons. There is a gross lack of political commitment from the elected representatives at the municipal level along with will power among the administrative head – the Commissioners. This often becomes more complex with a lower level staff, which lacks adequate training and exposure. In India, most number of training sessions are conducted for Commissioners and engineers, but seldom for collection staff or sanitary supervisors, who actually perform the work. The conundrum of mismanagement of waste has further been engulfed in various kinds of myths like:
Myth 1: More money, more staff required
Most municipalities in India as well as other developing nations often argue that there is a need for more financial and human resources to cater to the growing urban waste problem. But were these cities any cleaner when the rapid urbanisation had not occured? No. But if we look at the top five clean cities of India at different points of time, did they do it because they received a lot of money or had lots of resources? No. Surat, Suryapet, Namakkal, Nagpur, Latur, more recently, Warangal, Salur, Mysuru, Bobbili, Coimbatore and Alappuzha, made their cities cleaner and recycled more than 30% of their waste without much additional resources. In all of these, either the Mayor or the Commissioner took the leadership and they got their act together and made the cities clean. It was and is sheer power of what I call – commitment, honesty, will power, passion for cleanliness and the high moral values of the commissioners and mayors who took on the leadership role. Many of these cities and towns are relatively still cleaner than other cities of India.
Myth 2: State-of-the-art technology or the magic solutions
Our experts from municipalities and the crony consultants, and large waste management companies will often argue vociferously in favour of high end technology and massive industrial type processing of waste, with investment of billions of dollars. The bigger and the more so-called sophisticated state-of-the-art technology or the magic solution it is, the higher the chances of failure both for collection and processing for countries, particularly processing and treatment. And the reason why they want compactors, tippers, waste incineration, pyrolysis, and plasma arc plants, is clear; all these require big investments which translate into bigger commissions. Currently, any agency which has received a contract from a municipality, needs to bribe anywhere between 5-30% to get their bills approved. The failure of “Bigger is Better” technology in India is so conspicuous – Timarpur, Okhla and other RDF (Refuse Derived Fuel) plants of Andhra Pradesh, bio-methanisation plant of 300 ton capacity in Lucknow, all have failed, but the idea of magic solution still mesmerises many municipalities because of the sheer money and the resultant crony benefits to some. There are no magic solutions to waste problem and certainly not burning mixed waste in incinerators. The required investment in these technologies is often exaggerated by 3-4 times. The solution for India lies in strengthening the existing system and integrating the informal sector in collection and recycling. The informal sector can remove more than 60% of inorganic waste from dumpsites with little investment, and save more energy through recycling that can be generated through mass burning of waste. Two such beautiful systems of Latur and Pimpri Chinchwad of two pickers’ cooperative were sabotaged because the waste pickers’ cooperative could not grease the palm of elected and administrative officials. The municipality wanted to push a large private contractor at a much higher cost to just collect and dump. One such example of waste pickers’ cooperative in Pune is still serving 400,000 households, providing livelihood to 4,000 waste pickers, though often under great duress. There are other several small initiatives like this but not scaling to city level due to waste governance deficit. Hasirudala, another waste picker cooperative in Bangalore has over 3,500 waste pickers and recovers more recyclables than the entire municipal staff engaged in collection and transportation, at a much lower cost.
In the last few years, there has been a spurt in setting up of the so-called state-of-the-art incineration/RDF plants. My prediction is that very few of these will see the light of the day, and even if it becomes operational under political fuel, it will damage environment, public health and the recyclers of informal sector, the concrete evidences of this already has emerged from various surveys. The Okhla plant in Delhi is a live example of this. Dumpsites in almost all cities are already handling more waste than they can hold, and finding new landfills near cities is almost impossible due to public protest and bad management of dumpsite or even landfill sites by both municipalities and private operators. The solution lies in decentralised processing, and developing regional landfill sites.
Myth 3: Big contractor, local or multi-national, can help solve the problem
In the name of providing integrated solid waste management, there is often an inclination to call tenders which favour large companies including putting certain harsh conditions, which keeps the small but good players out. None of the cities figured in the cleanest city of the country when it employed these large companies in the last one decade. They relied on good local players, including SHG (Self-Help Groups) of women, waste picker cooperatives or even local NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) and small contractors. In Hyderabad, the cost of SWM (Solid Waste Management) per ton is less in the areas where very small private sector participated, compared to the areas serviced by municipality or big private sector elsewhere. In Mumbai, it is found that the cost of per ton of SWM is US$35 with community participation and local NGOs, US$41 with public private partnership (PPP) and US$44 when done by municipality on its own. It is even lesser with waste pickers’ cooperative working in Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad at US$28, with higher recycling rates and consequent higher waste diversion from dumpsites. Hence, community participation and involving local players trained in SWM is the ‘least cost option’ solution, and hence there is a strong case for comprehensively involving the informal sector waste pickers in it. The informal sector actually makes a difference in climate change mitigation through GHG reduction by recycling 15-20% of waste with no cost to the municipality. When you recycle more you nearly save more than half of the energy than if you would have to do it through extracting natural resources or produce it by burning waste in incinerators. India now also has many improved bio-methanisation system which can produce one MW of clean energy from 80-100 tons of separated organic waste or 230-240 cylinders of cooking gas at constant temperature from the same. And the cost of this is one third of any incineration plant. The investment cost can be recovered in 4-6 years time by selling the gas or the energy.
One of the key reasons for failure in delivering even a decent level of SWM services is lack of a separate division within the municipality, making it unaccountable for the mess. There are just a few exceptions to this like Surat, which has relatively much better SWM systems than any other city of India.
Are citizens responsible?
Lack of municipal by-laws or enforcement of penalties regarding littering and non-segregation are the two worst forms of waste governance deficits that happen in India. If you do not enforce it, you can never keep your city clean for long time, the reason being that there will always be in every society those who litter. Developed countries like Singapore, Switzerland, USA or Nordic countries are not clean only because its population is very educated or disciplined, but it‘s also the fear of heavy penalty that makes it work. It is the best form of awareness, for making the public understand the value of work done by the municipality. It is important that people must learn to pay for SWM services. The provision for payment for waste services are there in the laws but are not enforced because of objections by politicians. An informal survey carried out strongly indicates that people will pay and do segregation if there are systems in place and the laws enforced. The reason citizens are reluctant or raise objection to service fee is that municipalities have never provided that kind of efficient and quality services, that one can go and ask for service fee for SWM. The efficiency and quality of services is directly linked with willingness to pay or not, by the citizens.
Myth 4: Corruption has no connection to cleaner cities
Look at the top ten cleanest cities of the world, to name a few, not necessarily in the same order, Calgary, Honolulu, Helsinki, Kobe, Oslo, Adelaide, Brisbane, Wellington etc., and the corruption index. Is there a link between cleaner cities and corruption free cities? That certainly seems to be the case. These are the cities from the same countries which also figure in top 20 least corrupt countries of the world. There is a close link between good waste governance, cleaner cities and corrupt and filthy cities.
There is a huge need to reform municipal governance along with building capacity of the lower staff of the municipal systems. The Swachh Bharat Mission will not succeed as long as we do not see a much better commitment from Commissioners and Mayors working with the same goals of Swachha Mission. Political rivalries are killing a lot of initiatives at the municipal level. More than two years of Swachh Mission has not produced any desirable results due to the huge governance deficit that plague our municipalities.