Changing contours of solid waste management in India

Abstract

The solid waste management (SWM) sector in contemporary urban India has witnessed shifts in policy and practice in the wake of changing contours of urban governance resonating between international and domestic trends. These changes are characterized by measures to reduce public expenditure and gradual offloading of essential municipal services, increasing efficiency in service provision by privatization, decentralization, introduction of user charges and developing new delivery systems through greater involvement of non-state actors like community-based organizations and local contractors. Historically, SWM remained a neglected area until the intervention of the Supreme Court of India that resulted in the Municipal Solid Waste Management and Handling Rules, 2000, under the Environment Protection Act, 1986. As a solution to the inability of municipal authorities to handle conservancy operations, the Rules called for involvement of actors like community-based organizations, private contractors and nongovernment organizations (NGOs) in SWM functions. With findings from detailed case studies of two community programmes in the SWM sector in Mumbai, namely the Advanced Locality Management groups and the Slum Adoption Programme (SAP), and several NGOs that are involved in this sector, this article argues that increasing community participation, particularly that of middle-class residents results in greater fragmentation of interests and contestations informed by class. This trend of involving communities runs parallel with the municipal authority gradually offloading its obligatory responsibilities and passing them on to agencies like local contractors and spurious organizations that are often unaccountable and not transparent. The findings based on case studies in Mumbai argue how these changes in policy and practice clearly leave urban poor citizens like conservancy workers, volunteers of the SAP and slum residents at a disadvantageous position.

Keywords:

• solid waste management
• Mumbai
• urban governance
• community initiatives
• civic activism
• urban India

Notes

1. The SWM Rules, 2000, mark a watershed in the management of solid waste in urban centres in India as for the first time, they laid out procedures for waste collection, segregation, storage, transportation, processing and disposal. Second, these rules also specified standards for compost quality, health control and management and closure of landfills. Third, these rules stress upon collection of waste from its source of generation (households, office complexes and commercial areas) and give procedures for distinct treatment of different categories of waste. Fourth, the rules made the municipal body responsible to organize awareness programmes for segregation and recycling of waste. Finally, the municipal authorities were required to adopt proper technologies to recycle and process waste so as to minimize burden on landfill as prescribed in the rules. It was expected that individual states would form their own rules on SWM drawing copiously from the SWM Rules 2000 (Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India 2000).

2. The Localising Agenda 21 (LA21) Programme helps local authorities to use environmental planning and management (EPM) to identify and address key environmental issues. The programme focuses on the sustainable development of secondary towns. LA21 builds the EPM capacities of local authorities and supports human resource development. The programme encourages partnerships between various local actors, mobilizes resources and promotes exchange between cities facing similar problems (http://www.unhabitat.org/).