The waste crisis in Delhi isn’t over yet. What has ended is just an administrative crisis.
The municipal sanitation workers who did not report for work for 12 days, leading to accumulation of over 20,000 tonnes of waste on the capital’s roads and open spaces, called off their strike on June 12 after the state government announced release of funds to the cash-strapped civic body to pay their salaries.
Their return pulled the city back from a “waste disaster” that had threatened to cause a disease outbreak. Still, it spells just a momentary break in hostilities between Delhi’s Aam Aadmi Party government and the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled civic bodies (Municipal Corporation of Delhi was some years ago trifurcated into North Delhi Municipal Corporation, South Delhi Municipal Corporation, and East Delhi Municipal Corporation).
While the nearly 12,000 safai karamcharis of the East Delhi Municipal Corporation were away, the garbage crisis had become so severe that the Delhi High Court had to step in. On June 12, it issued a notice to the Centre, the Delhi government and the EDMC, directing clearing of the waste. The same day, the National Green Tribunal too issued a notice to the Delhi government, EDMC and NDMC, seeking response on the dumping of waste on the capital’s streets.
As an interim measure, the salaries of the civic workers were released. But there’s little doubt that the waste crisis in Delhi will linger on, since both the NDMC and EDMC are facing financial crunch. As per news reports, EDMC is short of Rs 365 crore and is under a debt of Rs 600 crore.
Without discrediting the demands of sanitation workers, the episode reminds us that Delhi needs to change its present waste management scenario, where non-collection can lead to a health scare and an environmental nightmare. What it needs is a decentralised, bottom-up perspective on waste management.
Empowering local communities
“Whereas non-payment of wages is a valid point, the waste crisis in Delhi would not be so terrible had the city followed decentralised waste management,” said Bharati Chaturvedi, founder director of New Delhi-based Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, a non-profit that works with waste pickers and waste dealers.
Chaturvedi explains that “in a decentralised system, local communities are empowered to handle their waste, and the informal sector of waste pickers and kabbadiwalas is an integral part of waste system. Daily collection of thousands of tonnes of waste and its transportation to a centralised waste processing facility or a landfill at the outskirts of the city is not required”.
Chaturvedi makes a crucial point. Typically, 60% to 70% of the waste from an Indian household is biodegradable (often referred to as organic or wet waste) and the rest non-biodegradable (often called dry waste). Biodegradable waste, which consists of kitchen waste, can easily be handled at the household level and need not be given to a safai karamchari. There are several simple methods of composting at home. And nobody can explain them better than Vani Murthy, a citizen activist and resident of Malleswaram in Bengaluru.
Five years ago, Murthy visited Mavallipura village where Bengaluru’s waste is dumped. She was so horrified at the sight of the landfill and the stories of diseases and destruction in the village that she decided never to send out her waste. Since that day, Murthy has been composting wet waste at home. Once a week or a month, she hands over the dry recyclables to a waste picker.
“If households practice segregation of waste at source, then very little waste needs to be given to the municipality,” said Murthy. “The new composting methods and techniques [Bokashi composting and products of Daily Dump] are so easy that these can be set up in a corner of the balcony or under the kitchen sink. Every day you dump organic waste into it and wait for garbage to convert into manure.”
Home improvement
Uday Bhawalkar, director of Pune-based Bhawalkar Ecological Research Institute, strongly supports the idea of decentralised waste management.
“Look at the issue of waste like air pollution,” said Bhawalkar. “It is easy to control pollution at individual car level than to think of cleaning the air when it has become a cocktail of pollutants and toxins. Similarly, waste should be handled at each household level than being dumped at some centralised facility or a landfill.”
Bhawalkar has developed a natural catalyst, called “biosanitizer”, that quickens the composting process of organic garbage when sprayed on it and ensure that there’s no stench. “An urban household needs only seven potted plants to handle its biodegradable waste,” he said. “Every day, organic waste can be put in one potted plant along with the biosanitizer. The waste will mix with the soil within a week and help in plant growth.”
In Pune, Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat, a registered trade union of women waste pickers and waste collectors, daily handles 600 tonnes of solid waste in a decentralised manner. “We are not saying that in a decentralised waste system, there will be no breakdowns,” remarked Lakshmi Narayan of the Panchayat. “However, the room for collapse would be much less. The spill-over of waste in a decentralised system would also be manageable. By no means, 20,000 tonnes of waste would accumulate on the roads and open public spaces.”
Narayan noted that for decentralised waste disposal, there may be an initial cost of setting up, say, 20 biomethanation plants and 100 composting pits but “in the long run it would be beneficial as there would be no cost of transporting waste long distance”. “Also, households would pay a monthly fee for door-to-door waste collection,” she added. “A decentralised system is also easy to monitor and has a sense of ownership among the local community.”
Buried under garbage
Not following this system clearly debilitated Delhi in the waste crisis this month.
A recent paper titled A Natural Solution produced by Chintan and authored by Seth Kolker reports that Delhi generates 8,000 tonnes per day of waste, but its three centralised compost plants (most Indian cities have one or no such plant) can handle only 700 tonnes per day. The rest is just dumped at the landfills. A May 2014 report of the erstwhile Planning Commission had warned that if the current practice of landfilling continues, India will need 340,000 cubic metres of land every single day to dump its waste.
“The recent waste crisis in Delhi is a cumulative disaster,” lashed out Chaturvedi. “It exposes the lacunae in policymaking and the wrong approach of centralised waste management that cities are following. Rather than empowering the local communities to manage their waste, the present waste system puts people completely at the mercy of politicians and bureaucrats.” According to her, if waste is handled in a decentralised manner, only 20% will go to a landfill. This, too, can be reduced over a period of time.
Some private waste management companies, having burnt their fingers, are already moving towards decentralised systems. Between 1992 and 2004, Mumbai-based Excel Industries Ltd set up 15 centralised composting plants with capacities ranging from 100 tonnes per day to 500 tonnes per day. However, most of its plants ran into problems and shut down. At present, the company operates only one centralised compost plant in Ahmedabad, Gujarat (this, too, remains shut for four months of the monsoon when waste flows with the rainwater). Its focus now is on decentralised waste management solutions.
Citizens, too, want decentralised waste systems, as shown by a 2014 survey report co-authored by Chintan, Germany’s GIZ and the Department of Environment of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. The survey of 3,047 households across Delhi found that 70% of the respondents agreed to composting at home and a majority of them were ready to pay more for better doorstep collection of waste.
If Indian cities do not wish to bury under their own waste, they have to adopt decentralisation. Kerala is already moving in that direction. Last month, on May 26, the Local Self Government Department of the Kerala government issued an order making “mandatory source level treatment facilities for biodegradable waste in all households and buildings”. Will Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who pitched his Swachh Bharat Abhiyan as a game-changer, pay heed?
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The municipal sanitation workers who did not report for work for 12 days, leading to accumulation of over 20,000 tonnes of waste on the capital’s roads and open spaces, called off their strike on June 12 after the state government announced release of funds to the cash-strapped civic body to pay their salaries.
Their return pulled the city back from a “waste disaster” that had threatened to cause a disease outbreak. Still, it spells just a momentary break in hostilities between Delhi’s Aam Aadmi Party government and the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled civic bodies (Municipal Corporation of Delhi was some years ago trifurcated into North Delhi Municipal Corporation, South Delhi Municipal Corporation, and East Delhi Municipal Corporation).
While the nearly 12,000 safai karamcharis of the East Delhi Municipal Corporation were away, the garbage crisis had become so severe that the Delhi High Court had to step in. On June 12, it issued a notice to the Centre, the Delhi government and the EDMC, directing clearing of the waste. The same day, the National Green Tribunal too issued a notice to the Delhi government, EDMC and NDMC, seeking response on the dumping of waste on the capital’s streets.
As an interim measure, the salaries of the civic workers were released. But there’s little doubt that the waste crisis in Delhi will linger on, since both the NDMC and EDMC are facing financial crunch. As per news reports, EDMC is short of Rs 365 crore and is under a debt of Rs 600 crore.
Without discrediting the demands of sanitation workers, the episode reminds us that Delhi needs to change its present waste management scenario, where non-collection can lead to a health scare and an environmental nightmare. What it needs is a decentralised, bottom-up perspective on waste management.
Empowering local communities
“Whereas non-payment of wages is a valid point, the waste crisis in Delhi would not be so terrible had the city followed decentralised waste management,” said Bharati Chaturvedi, founder director of New Delhi-based Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, a non-profit that works with waste pickers and waste dealers.
Chaturvedi explains that “in a decentralised system, local communities are empowered to handle their waste, and the informal sector of waste pickers and kabbadiwalas is an integral part of waste system. Daily collection of thousands of tonnes of waste and its transportation to a centralised waste processing facility or a landfill at the outskirts of the city is not required”.
Chaturvedi makes a crucial point. Typically, 60% to 70% of the waste from an Indian household is biodegradable (often referred to as organic or wet waste) and the rest non-biodegradable (often called dry waste). Biodegradable waste, which consists of kitchen waste, can easily be handled at the household level and need not be given to a safai karamchari. There are several simple methods of composting at home. And nobody can explain them better than Vani Murthy, a citizen activist and resident of Malleswaram in Bengaluru.
Five years ago, Murthy visited Mavallipura village where Bengaluru’s waste is dumped. She was so horrified at the sight of the landfill and the stories of diseases and destruction in the village that she decided never to send out her waste. Since that day, Murthy has been composting wet waste at home. Once a week or a month, she hands over the dry recyclables to a waste picker.
“If households practice segregation of waste at source, then very little waste needs to be given to the municipality,” said Murthy. “The new composting methods and techniques [Bokashi composting and products of Daily Dump] are so easy that these can be set up in a corner of the balcony or under the kitchen sink. Every day you dump organic waste into it and wait for garbage to convert into manure.”
Home improvement
Uday Bhawalkar, director of Pune-based Bhawalkar Ecological Research Institute, strongly supports the idea of decentralised waste management.
“Look at the issue of waste like air pollution,” said Bhawalkar. “It is easy to control pollution at individual car level than to think of cleaning the air when it has become a cocktail of pollutants and toxins. Similarly, waste should be handled at each household level than being dumped at some centralised facility or a landfill.”
Bhawalkar has developed a natural catalyst, called “biosanitizer”, that quickens the composting process of organic garbage when sprayed on it and ensure that there’s no stench. “An urban household needs only seven potted plants to handle its biodegradable waste,” he said. “Every day, organic waste can be put in one potted plant along with the biosanitizer. The waste will mix with the soil within a week and help in plant growth.”
In Pune, Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat, a registered trade union of women waste pickers and waste collectors, daily handles 600 tonnes of solid waste in a decentralised manner. “We are not saying that in a decentralised waste system, there will be no breakdowns,” remarked Lakshmi Narayan of the Panchayat. “However, the room for collapse would be much less. The spill-over of waste in a decentralised system would also be manageable. By no means, 20,000 tonnes of waste would accumulate on the roads and open public spaces.”
Narayan noted that for decentralised waste disposal, there may be an initial cost of setting up, say, 20 biomethanation plants and 100 composting pits but “in the long run it would be beneficial as there would be no cost of transporting waste long distance”. “Also, households would pay a monthly fee for door-to-door waste collection,” she added. “A decentralised system is also easy to monitor and has a sense of ownership among the local community.”
Buried under garbage
Not following this system clearly debilitated Delhi in the waste crisis this month.
A recent paper titled A Natural Solution produced by Chintan and authored by Seth Kolker reports that Delhi generates 8,000 tonnes per day of waste, but its three centralised compost plants (most Indian cities have one or no such plant) can handle only 700 tonnes per day. The rest is just dumped at the landfills. A May 2014 report of the erstwhile Planning Commission had warned that if the current practice of landfilling continues, India will need 340,000 cubic metres of land every single day to dump its waste.
“The recent waste crisis in Delhi is a cumulative disaster,” lashed out Chaturvedi. “It exposes the lacunae in policymaking and the wrong approach of centralised waste management that cities are following. Rather than empowering the local communities to manage their waste, the present waste system puts people completely at the mercy of politicians and bureaucrats.” According to her, if waste is handled in a decentralised manner, only 20% will go to a landfill. This, too, can be reduced over a period of time.
Some private waste management companies, having burnt their fingers, are already moving towards decentralised systems. Between 1992 and 2004, Mumbai-based Excel Industries Ltd set up 15 centralised composting plants with capacities ranging from 100 tonnes per day to 500 tonnes per day. However, most of its plants ran into problems and shut down. At present, the company operates only one centralised compost plant in Ahmedabad, Gujarat (this, too, remains shut for four months of the monsoon when waste flows with the rainwater). Its focus now is on decentralised waste management solutions.
Citizens, too, want decentralised waste systems, as shown by a 2014 survey report co-authored by Chintan, Germany’s GIZ and the Department of Environment of the National Capital Territory of Delhi. The survey of 3,047 households across Delhi found that 70% of the respondents agreed to composting at home and a majority of them were ready to pay more for better doorstep collection of waste.
If Indian cities do not wish to bury under their own waste, they have to adopt decentralisation. Kerala is already moving in that direction. Last month, on May 26, the Local Self Government Department of the Kerala government issued an order making “mandatory source level treatment facilities for biodegradable waste in all households and buildings”. Will Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who pitched his Swachh Bharat Abhiyan as a game-changer, pay heed?