Anyone who visited Indore before and after 2018 could spot a transformation in the whole city. The change is mesmerising. The city is now clean and competing with some developed world cities in terms of cleanliness. There is no litter, no dustbins and even animals were missing from the roads. Overall, it gave a sense of freshness and improved sense of quality of life. It can be sensed that some serious measures were being taken by the city government. Delving deeper into what went on to make the city change so much, it’s clear that it wasn’t one thing but a combination of so many aspects and the number of stakeholders involved. Process alignment was one such thing to begin with that the city government undertook. Under the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) planned to make the city of Indore –
● Bin-free
● Litter-free
● Dust-free
These initiatives required immense process reorientation at the municipal level. Previous systems couldn’t handle the new expectations set up under SBM. The city government went into a system rejuvenation before embarking on any citizen interface. They designed a demand-based system building flexibilities for efficiency and productivity. The process rejuvenation happened at different fronts and at each step of the process ranging from infrastructure creation, resource deployment (manpower, machinery, and equipment), technological interventions, monitoring and surveillance, and enforcement. Process alignment should be the antecedent for any change management program. Before approaching the citizens for a behavioural change management program, the city government was conscious enough to streamline and introduce change management within its internal functioning of waste collection to align it with the expectations of the citizens.
Approaching the citizens to change their behaviour without having a smooth and efficient system would backfire and breach the trust of the citizens. The citizens should experience that the change in their behaviour and all the efforts put in by them are leading to an appropriate outcome. Cities should be careful that the citizens watch them closely when triggered for changing any practice. Process alignment is a reassurance to the citizens that the government is serious in its mandate. This is a crucial element in the whole change management process. If trust gets breached once it becomes very difficult to navigate through the implementation of any transformational exercise. A completely new waste collection mechanism was designed based on the generator segments. The previous system was broken and followed a piecemeal approach.
The initiative started in a phased manner from January to December 2016. It was believed that if bins are present then people will be encouraged to throw waste at any point in time. The city would need continuous cleaning. Moreover, the popular practice was to throw waste from a distance in the community bins as the surrounding areas near the bins were always littered. Aim went wrong, the waste would end up near the bin making the place dirtier and inviting animals to feed upon. Since the large bins were scheduled for collection infrequently the waste used to
start decomposing leading to rusting and leakage of the bins and leachate contaminating the soil and sub surfaces. Hence the first step in streamlining the process for Bin Free city was to create an efficient door-to-door collection system. For this the city government categorised the waste generators as per the SWM rules 2016 waste as follows:
● Domestic generators: Generators that generate less than 25 kg of waste per day.
● Semi bulk generators: Generators that generate 25-50 kg of waste per day have been classified
as semi-bulk generators.
● Bulk generators: The generators generating more than 50 kg of waste have been classified as
bulk generators.
The city officials didn’t jump into mass implementation but experimented at a small scale as pilot projects. In January 2016, a pilot study in two wards was conducted for the analysis of waste (domestic and commercial). In the pilot study the number of households, quantum of waste, route plan, vehicle capacity, vehicle requirements, etc. were examined. Several iterations went on to draw out an optimal route plan for door-to-door (D2D) collection coverage and to estimate the time required for scheduling the tipper trucks. The route plans for tippers were initially hand-drawn for the wards under study. In these pilot wards since the beginning emphasis was laid on waste segregation. The workers from the city government (Indore Municipal Corporation – IMC) and an NGO selected for the purpose covered the ward on foot with the tippers to educate and inform the citizens about waste smart segregation and ensure that households segregate their waste. The pilot which went on for three months, helped establish an optimal system in place which could be scaled up to ten wards.
Learnings from the pilot study were immensely helpful in scaling up the change to other wards. Initially, 40 cycle rickshaws and 80 sanitary workers (Safaimitra) were deployed in every ward. The collection and transportation cost came to around Rs. 2886 per MT. With the use of tippers, it was observed that one small tipper covered one thousand households in a single trip. To make the system efficient more tippers were deployed against cycle rickshaws, and it came out that 4-5 tippers were sufficient in covering the collection of the ward waste. It led to a reduction of manpower as well as time, but fuel expenses went up. However, the calculation revealed that using tipper vans for a collection made the cost reduce to Rs 1662 per MT. This was an interesting finding and it led to mass purchase of tipper vans to be deployed for other wards.
However, the requirement of hand carts couldn’t be ruled out to cater to some congested areas with narrow lanes in the ward. Hence each ward was allocated five handcarts for collection of drain silt and 5 cycle rickshaws for narrow lanes along with tipper vans. This way resource identification was done, and a cost-benefit analysis revealed the optimal numbers as per the requirements in the ward. The new system was quite a decentralised bottom-up process emanating from the ward level.The pilot study revealed that effective Door-to-Door (D2D) collection reduced the garbage on roads and open areas. Garbage vulnerable points also started disappearing and pilot wards started appearing clean. Hence the pilot study gave the city government firsthand experience of the challenges as well as solutions for the same.
Excerpted with permission from Transforming Waste Management: Challenges and Success of an Indian City, Asad Warsi and Mercy S Samuel, Routledge India.
