Challenges of Waste Management in India

Almitra Patel, a civic activist and the first woman engineer to have graduated from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, was appalled that Indian cities did not know what to do with her. with their waste. In the 1990s, most of this waste was simply dumped in the open. She brought this to the attention of the Supreme Court of India demanding a stop to the open dumping of waste. The Apex Court set up a committee to suggest solutions to the problem of solid waste management which eventually led to the passage of the Solid Waste Management Rules 2000. Indian cities have still not learned to manage their waste. A new set of solid waste management rules have also been enacted in 2016. Many petitions, many committees and many rules later, what has changed? Have we paid attention to the lives of those who manage our waste? We look at these questions by following the journey of waste in Delhi. I am 23 years old and I go to the market at 6 am. This is dangerous. Yes, it is a problem. People say that thieves do this. And the other day, a policeman said that you are Bangladeshi. If you come here, I will arrest you. There were many problems, but this is the only one. There are many problems like the blades, the hands of the children, the dirt. It was not good that the dust and dirt used to stick to the walls. But now it has become a habit. I applied the law for good, but nothing good happened. Delhi, the capital of India, has failed in managing its solid waste. According to the Master Plan of the City 2021, three of Delhi's landfill sites exhausted their capacity in 2008. If you look at waste management in India overall, there's about 62 million tonnes per annum of garbage that is produced on an annual basis, which is roughly 41,000 tonnes per day. Coming down to Delhi, amongst the metropolitans, it is the highest generator. Somewhere around 11,000 to 11,500 tons per day of garbage that is collected or produced every day. Less than 5% of decentralized processing in Delhi. Almost 80% of centralized incineration-based processing, which is via waste-to-energy plants. And then the remaining of it is dumped. So I feel in terms of painting a picture on processing and disposal, I think this is the worst model that exists in the country and contradictory to the fact that this is the capital. Delhi has two distinct waste disposal mechanisms. The source of waste is mostly households and hotels. The first mechanism is the informal waste picker. And the other one, a private concessionaire employed by the MCD. If you look at waste management in Delhi, you can basically divide it into two parts. One is the formal management system, which is majorly governed by the municipality, and the informal system. Where in the RWA is open in formal sector and then the work goes by. In the formal chain typically it works as a contract agreement between the municipality and a private concessionaire. Basically they hire a third party agency that is responsible for collection, taking waste to a designated point from where it goes for processing and disposal. In an informal chain, basically all the resident welfare associations of Delhi they open informal sector for collecting waste and then they would in their push cards go to a designated point which is Dhalaw in case of Delhi and from there it's picked up by a municipal compactor and then in certain areas of Delhi it goes to a fixed compactor transfer station and from there to a waste to energy plant. In certain areas of Delhi, directly from there goes to a dumping point. So these are the two collection mechanisms that are adopted in Delhi predominantly. Appalled by how Indian urban centers manage their municipal solid waste, Almitra Patel, a civic activist, filed a petition in the Supreme Court in 1996. This led to the enactment of the Municipal Solid Waste Management Rules 2000. Many petitions have been filed since, and many orders passed. There have been some major cases in the Supreme Court. BL Vadhera comes to mind as the first case of trying to look at solid waste management. Then, Almitra Patel's case came out. And, you know, so in municipal solid waste I'm talking about. But now there have been so many judgments of the National Green Tribunal, the high courts, the lower courts, it's everywhere. But basically after 2016, we've had this modified municipal solid waste rules. So the court's rule is pretty solid, I think. The rule has all areas, all grounds covered because long experience of understanding what the problems were in the 2000 rules. The NGT, through orders in Almitra Patel v. Union of India is monitoring the implementation of Solid Waste Management Rules 2016. Despite several judgments being passed by the Apex Court of the country and the National Green Tribunal, there are problems in their implementation. The most important one is integration. SWM Rules 2016 and SWM Bylaws encouraged integration of the informal sector into the waste value chain. But the Solid Waste Management System in Delhi barely offers any recommendations for informal waste pickers. Delhi also has a huge population of informal workers. If you break it down into numbers, it's about 1.3 to 1.4 million. And if you talk about the country figure as a whole, 2% of the urban population of the country is informal sector, which are directly or indirectly related with waste management related jobs. Imagine a life in a city without a kabadiwala, without a rack picker. The moment you throw something that has value, it just gets vanished from the road and there's no magician out there. There's actually a rack picker who picks it up and sends it to the informal recycling stream. So I feel it's high time that cities, especially cities like Delhi, give due credit to the informal system. Also, municipalities here should play a crucial role in ensuring that informal sector is somehow integrated. The people who collect garbage and sell it, they take a bill of Rs. 150 and eat their bread, tea and water. They sell it for their expenses. Practicals are doing a great service. They are rendering a huge service to society. That needs to be acknowledged. They should be paid for it. Otherwise they are living on the edge and just trying to sell whatever they pick and make a little bit of money out of it. But if they are made safe because they are constantly exposed to batteries and toxic things and rusted metal and broken glass. So they need to be looked after, they need to be made safe, they need to understand their own safety. They need to earn some money from it. Because it's a service. The importance of acknowledging them is basically or acknowledging the sector is then you can actually create more robust partnerships with them. So the informal sector is responsible for a lot of the collection. Even when formal sector actors get contracts, they normally informally subcontract. the informal sector. In Delhi, in East Delhi, most of the doorstep collection is still done by informal sector. The East Delhi Municipal Cooperation has not very much to do with it and they also do the segregation, they also do the hyper segregation. NGT directed that tipping fees should be based on the quality of waste. But the tipping fee is usually charged by the plant operators based on the quantity of the mixed waste received at the plant. Municipalities really need to update. game. Also the kind of collaborations that they do with private bodies, there's a concept called tipping fee, wherein you sign an agreement with a private concessionaire and most of the times these agreements are based on collection and transportation and disposal of garbage. I feel that that needs to change. In the West, tipping fee means that if you dump, you pay, if you incinerate, you pay. Which means that if you use any resources of municipality, you need to pay a fee. But I think in India we have really adopted it in a long manner. Here if we dump, we get money. If we incinerate, we get money which is the tipping fee. So I think tipping fee, the entire concept needs to be worked down. It has to be on collection and processing and not collection and disposal. The vehicle that is parked here, it is not the employee who is getting it. It is the company that is getting it. It is a vehicle from the company. We are not getting anything from the waste we pick up. We should have been given this work. According to the new rules of SWM 2016, segregation is the responsibility of the waste generator. In fact, according to the new rules, segregation needs to be ensured at all steps of the waste chain. People don't do this at their maximum. But they should exercise. Now, who knows, there is no reason or reason. Because they are doing it for a month or two. Otherwise, the garbage would go in the bucket. Awareness. Some people don't have awareness. They are lazy. So, they take everything in one go. They throw it away. At home, the garbage man comes and takes it. But it doesn't happen separately. Everything is going in one go. People don't segregate their waste adequately, particularly things like syringes which diabetics use, diapers, menstrual waste, sharps, broken glass, all of that is mixed up and thrown away in the waste, you know, routinely. and then they get injuries and when they get injuries they're not able to work as efficiently and if those injuries are quite serious for example if there's acid that you've thrown away after cleaning and somebody opens that bottle and they're just just taken a bunch of acid fumes they might not even be able to work and they might need medical help in which case not only did they lose earnings but they also lose well you know money for the day and so vulnerability not only comes from external factors beyond you know the control of waste generators it also vulnerability is also generated by poor behavior exhibited by waste generators cardboard has to go in cardboard paper The paper has to go in the paper. The garbage collectors used to come and segregate the garbage. They used to reuse the garbage and make plastic bags. A lot of things used to happen. But now, all that doesn't happen anymore. I think what people used to do earlier was much better. Now, because we have become so modernized, we say this is a waste. We don't have time to do all this. I didn't know what to put in what. Dirty, wet, dry, dirty clothes. or the pieces of glass that were cut by hands or feet. It was a problem. Suppose I am the consumer, I am the citizen, I am segregating my waste. But when the waste gets collected, it gets collected again in the same bin, in the same truck. If you want my segregated waste you must show that two waste bins are going to different places so that it's a systemic requirement so for citizens action to succeed you need the systems also in place otherwise you lose motivation. If the garbage guy comes they should be that much educated that you have to keep which garbage in the water or it has two boxes. They just come with a big bag and everybody is giving the black bags to them or whatever bags they have or they empty their buckets in there. There are They can be dry, wet or even rejected. They would have been more affected if the government had given them a drum to fill the water. But they don't do anything. They just install the bucket in their work. That's the situation. They will mix everything together. Do you think MCD actually communicates with the citizens? I don't think so. If they had a decent awareness campaign telling people what happens to the waste and how waste needs to be managed and how the landfills are growing and growing and how... it becomes toxic, but most citizens don't know. And a lot of them don't care because they don't know. To tackle the issue of waste management, the mindset of the courts, implementing bodies and people. needs to change. There has to be a shift in values causing triggered responses. No rules or judgements can be implemented without a systemic change. Waste is something that can be managed. It's not something that needs to be just thrown out and left to the municipality. The courts also are following this top-down approach. They are ordering the municipalities. Now, ordering the municipalities, how long can you pardon the expression, but flog a dead horse? It's doing what it can. It's the nature of the beast. So you need to, if the court needs to play a role, they need to find ways in which the municipalities can work differently. Maybe order a committee which will think how the municipalities can do the same thing differently, or how they can ensure. Maybe a different way in which you measure success. When it comes to court orders, I also feel that it shouldn't be all about hearings. It should be about real action on the ground and I feel sometimes that is lagging. It shouldn't be all about paperwork where municipalities and pollution control boards are only working to submit documents to the court. I feel the court should also look into implementation in terms of what real change after an order has been prosecuted, what has happened on the ground. The Supreme Court has already done it, but the Delhi Municipality should also do it. The Delhi Municipality should also see how this poor man will live. He got the goods but he didn't get the bank. So the corporation should also do something for him. We have to invest money into improved recycling. Because at this point in the recycling hubs that we have in Delhi, according to government, they can be polluting. And if they are polluting, it's our job to use technology and help them not to be polluting rather than merely close them down because that's not a solution, they'll go somewhere else and pollute somewhere else. So we all have to train each other, including our helpers and the garbage collector, as to what is wet waste and what is dry waste. And then keep it separately and give it separately. And then hopefully it stays separate as it goes to the dhalao. Subtitles by the Amara.org community And when it reaches the landfill. You have to start from your own house. Nobody else is going to come and do it for you. It is hard to say if courts can really play that role. You know, the courts may not be in the best position to do such long-term intensive monitoring. After all, there are judicial bodies. They are very good when they have to pass judgement on something. But to monitor action on the ground... It's a hard thing for the court to do. So often many of these committees which are formed or these groups with the court orders, they end up giving a report to the court. And the court then gives some directions based on that and the case gets closed. But nothing changes on the ground. All the capacities of PCBs or municipalities in a way should be upgraded so that there's a dedicated person to look into, you know, various cases or various orders that happen on waste management or other allied issues. If the Supreme Court doesn't listen to the judge, then we won't listen to them. If you don't identify the bottlenecks, then the judgments don't make very much sense to my mind. But if you identify bottlenecks, then you can break those bottlenecks using judicial power. So the courts are doing the best, but the system has to now also meet the expectations.

She brought this to the attention of the Supreme Court of India demanding a stop to the open dumping of waste. The Apex Court set up a committee to suggest solutions to the problem of solid waste management which eventually led to the passage of the Solid Waste Management Rules 2000. Indian cities have still not learned to manage their waste. A new set of solid waste management rules have also been enacted in 2016. Many petitions, many committees and many rules later, what has changed?

Have we paid attention to the lives of those who manage our waste? We look at these questions by following the journey of waste in Delhi. I am 23 years old and I go to the market at 6 am.

This is dangerous. Yes, it is a problem. People say that thieves do this.

And the other day, a policeman said that you are Bangladeshi. If you come here, I will arrest you. There were many problems, but this is the only one. There are many problems like the blades, the hands of the children, the dirt.

It was not good that the dust and dirt used to stick to the walls. But now it has become a habit. I applied the law for good, but nothing good happened.

Delhi, the capital of India, has failed in managing its solid waste. According to the Master Plan of the City 2021, three of Delhi's landfill sites exhausted their capacity in 2008. If you look at waste management in India overall, there's about 62 million tonnes per annum of garbage that is produced on an annual basis, which is roughly 41,000 tonnes per day. Coming down to Delhi, amongst the metropolitans, it is the highest generator. Somewhere around 11,000 to 11,500 tons per day of garbage that is collected or produced every day.

Less than 5% of decentralized processing in Delhi. Almost 80% of centralized incineration-based processing, which is via waste-to-energy plants. And then the remaining of it is dumped.

So I feel in terms of painting a picture on processing and disposal, I think this is the worst model that exists in the country and contradictory to the fact that this is the capital. Delhi has two distinct waste disposal mechanisms. The source of waste is mostly households and hotels. The first mechanism is the informal waste picker.

And the other one, a private concessionaire employed by the MCD. If you look at waste management in Delhi, you can basically divide it into two parts. One is the formal management system, which is majorly governed by the municipality, and the informal system. Where in the RWA is open in formal sector and then the work goes by. In the formal chain typically it works as a contract agreement between the municipality and a private concessionaire.

Basically they hire a third party agency that is responsible for collection, taking waste to a designated point from where it goes for processing and disposal. In an informal chain, basically all the resident welfare associations of Delhi they open informal sector for collecting waste and then they would in their push cards go to a designated point which is Dhalaw in case of Delhi and from there it's picked up by a municipal compactor and then in certain areas of Delhi it goes to a fixed compactor transfer station and from there to a waste to energy plant. In certain areas of Delhi, directly from there goes to a dumping point.

So these are the two collection mechanisms that are adopted in Delhi predominantly. Appalled by how Indian urban centers manage their municipal solid waste, Almitra Patel, a civic activist, filed a petition in the Supreme Court in 1996. This led to the enactment of the Municipal Solid Waste Management Rules 2000. Many petitions have been filed since, and many orders passed. There have been some major cases in the Supreme Court.

BL Vadhera comes to mind as the first case of trying to look at solid waste management. Then, Almitra Patel's case came out. And, you know, so in municipal solid waste I'm talking about. But now there have been so many judgments of the National Green Tribunal, the high courts, the lower courts, it's everywhere. But basically after 2016, we've had this modified municipal solid waste rules.

So the court's rule is pretty solid, I think. The rule has all areas, all grounds covered because long experience of understanding what the problems were in the 2000 rules. The NGT, through orders in Almitra Patel v. Union of India is monitoring the implementation of Solid Waste Management Rules 2016. Despite several judgments being passed by the Apex Court of the country and the National Green Tribunal, there are problems in their implementation. The most important one is integration. SWM Rules 2016 and SWM Bylaws encouraged integration of the informal sector into the waste value chain.

But the Solid Waste Management System in Delhi barely offers any recommendations for informal waste pickers. Delhi also has a huge population of informal workers. If you break it down into numbers, it's about 1.3 to 1.4 million. And if you talk about the country figure as a whole, 2% of the urban population of the country is informal sector, which are directly or indirectly related with waste management related jobs. Imagine a life in a city without a kabadiwala, without a rack picker.

The moment you throw something that has value, it just gets vanished from the road and there's no magician out there. There's actually a rack picker who picks it up and sends it to the informal recycling stream. So I feel it's high time that cities, especially cities like Delhi, give due credit to the informal system.

Also, municipalities here should play a crucial role in ensuring that informal sector is somehow integrated. The people who collect garbage and sell it, they take a bill of Rs. 150 and eat their bread, tea and water. They sell it for their expenses. Practicals are doing a great service. They are rendering a huge service to society.

That needs to be acknowledged. They should be paid for it. Otherwise they are living on the edge and just trying to sell whatever they pick and make a little bit of money out of it. But if they are made safe because they are constantly exposed to batteries and toxic things and rusted metal and broken glass.

So they need to be looked after, they need to be made safe, they need to understand their own safety. They need to earn some money from it. Because it's a service.

The importance of acknowledging them is basically or acknowledging the sector is then you can actually create more robust partnerships with them. So the informal sector is responsible for a lot of the collection. Even when formal sector actors get contracts, they normally informally subcontract.

the informal sector. In Delhi, in East Delhi, most of the doorstep collection is still done by informal sector. The East Delhi Municipal Cooperation has not very much to do with it and they also do the segregation, they also do the hyper segregation. NGT directed that tipping fees should be based on the quality of waste.

But the tipping fee is usually charged by the plant operators based on the quantity of the mixed waste received at the plant. Municipalities really need to update. game.

Also the kind of collaborations that they do with private bodies, there's a concept called tipping fee, wherein you sign an agreement with a private concessionaire and most of the times these agreements are based on collection and transportation and disposal of garbage. I feel that that needs to change. In the West, tipping fee means that if you dump, you pay, if you incinerate, you pay.

Which means that if you use any resources of municipality, you need to pay a fee. But I think in India we have really adopted it in a long manner. Here if we dump, we get money. If we incinerate, we get money which is the tipping fee.

So I think tipping fee, the entire concept needs to be worked down. It has to be on collection and processing and not collection and disposal. The vehicle that is parked here, it is not the employee who is getting it. It is the company that is getting it. It is a vehicle from the company.

We are not getting anything from the waste we pick up. We should have been given this work. According to the new rules of SWM 2016, segregation is the responsibility of the waste generator. In fact, according to the new rules, segregation needs to be ensured at all steps of the waste chain. People don't do this at their maximum.

But they should exercise. Now, who knows, there is no reason or reason. Because they are doing it for a month or two.

Otherwise, the garbage would go in the bucket. Awareness. Some people don't have awareness.

They are lazy. So, they take everything in one go. They throw it away. At home, the garbage man comes and takes it. But it doesn't happen separately.

Everything is going in one go. People don't segregate their waste adequately, particularly things like syringes which diabetics use, diapers, menstrual waste, sharps, broken glass, all of that is mixed up and thrown away in the waste, you know, routinely. and then they get injuries and when they get injuries they're not able to work as efficiently and if those injuries are quite serious for example if there's acid that you've thrown away after cleaning and somebody opens that bottle and they're just just taken a bunch of acid fumes they might not even be able to work and they might need medical help in which case not only did they lose earnings but they also lose well you know money for the day and so vulnerability not only comes from external factors beyond you know the control of waste generators it also vulnerability is also generated by poor behavior exhibited by waste generators cardboard has to go in cardboard paper The paper has to go in the paper.

The garbage collectors used to come and segregate the garbage. They used to reuse the garbage and make plastic bags. A lot of things used to happen.

But now, all that doesn't happen anymore. I think what people used to do earlier was much better. Now, because we have become so modernized, we say this is a waste.

We don't have time to do all this. I didn't know what to put in what. Dirty, wet, dry, dirty clothes.

or the pieces of glass that were cut by hands or feet. It was a problem. Suppose I am the consumer, I am the citizen, I am segregating my waste. But when the waste gets collected, it gets collected again in the same bin, in the same truck. If you want my segregated waste you must show that two waste bins are going to different places so that it's a systemic requirement so for citizens action to succeed you need the systems also in place otherwise you lose motivation.

If the garbage guy comes they should be that much educated that you have to keep which garbage in the water or it has two boxes. They just come with a big bag and everybody is giving the black bags to them or whatever bags they have or they empty their buckets in there. There are They can be dry, wet or even rejected. They would have been more affected if the government had given them a drum to fill the water. But they don't do anything.

They just install the bucket in their work. That's the situation. They will mix everything together.

Do you think MCD actually communicates with the citizens? I don't think so. If they had a decent awareness campaign telling people what happens to the waste and how waste needs to be managed and how the landfills are growing and growing and how... it becomes toxic, but most citizens don't know.

And a lot of them don't care because they don't know. To tackle the issue of waste management, the mindset of the courts, implementing bodies and people. needs to change. There has to be a shift in values causing triggered responses.

No rules or judgements can be implemented without a systemic change. Waste is something that can be managed. It's not something that needs to be just thrown out and left to the municipality.

The courts also are following this top-down approach. They are ordering the municipalities. Now, ordering the municipalities, how long can you pardon the expression, but flog a dead horse?

It's doing what it can. It's the nature of the beast. So you need to, if the court needs to play a role, they need to find ways in which the municipalities can work differently.

Maybe order a committee which will think how the municipalities can do the same thing differently, or how they can ensure. Maybe a different way in which you measure success. When it comes to court orders, I also feel that it shouldn't be all about hearings.

It should be about real action on the ground and I feel sometimes that is lagging. It shouldn't be all about paperwork where municipalities and pollution control boards are only working to submit documents to the court. I feel the court should also look into implementation in terms of what real change after an order has been prosecuted, what has happened on the ground. The Supreme Court has already done it, but the Delhi Municipality should also do it.

The Delhi Municipality should also see how this poor man will live. He got the goods but he didn't get the bank. So the corporation should also do something for him.

We have to invest money into improved recycling. Because at this point in the recycling hubs that we have in Delhi, according to government, they can be polluting. And if they are polluting, it's our job to use technology and help them not to be polluting rather than merely close them down because that's not a solution, they'll go somewhere else and pollute somewhere else. So we all have to train each other, including our helpers and the garbage collector, as to what is wet waste and what is dry waste. And then keep it separately and give it separately.

And then hopefully it stays separate as it goes to the dhalao. Subtitles by the Amara.org community And when it reaches the landfill. You have to start from your own house. Nobody else is going to come and do it for you.

It is hard to say if courts can really play that role. You know, the courts may not be in the best position to do such long-term intensive monitoring. After all, there are judicial bodies. They are very good when they have to pass judgement on something. But to monitor action on the ground...

It's a hard thing for the court to do. So often many of these committees which are formed or these groups with the court orders, they end up giving a report to the court. And the court then gives some directions based on that and the case gets closed.

But nothing changes on the ground. All the capacities of PCBs or municipalities in a way should be upgraded so that there's a dedicated person to look into, you know, various cases or various orders that happen on waste management or other allied issues. If the Supreme Court doesn't listen to the judge, then we won't listen to them. If you don't identify the bottlenecks, then the judgments don't make very much sense to my mind.

But if you identify bottlenecks, then you can break those bottlenecks using judicial power. So the courts are doing the best, but the system has to now also meet the expectations.

Transcript for:Challenges of Waste Management in India

Transcript for:
Challenges of Waste Management in India