India's west-central city of Indore is a perfect example of what determination and buy-in from the citizenry can do when it comes to cleanliness and effective and efficient waste management.
For the seventh year in a row, the city of 3.5 million was adjudged India’s cleanest – no mean feat considering that when the award launched eight years ago, Indore was languishing in 25th position.
A team of Latin American and Caribbean journalists, on a media familiarisation tour arranged by the Indian government’s Ministry of External Affairs, left Delhi on February 21 and flew to Indore.
The following day, the team visited the headquarters of Smart City Indore, the brains behind the city’s waste management clean-up and recycling. Its CEO Divyank Singh and solid waste management expert Shraddha Tomar explained how things are done.
In 2014, the Government launched its Swatch Bharat Mission (Clean India Mission) saw one of the main objectives being to create open-defecation-free towns by constructing thousands of individual, community and public toilets. This was coupled with an aggressive focus on a more scientific approach to solid waste management.
For decades, India’s mighty rivers, including the Ganges and the Yamuna, were well-known as being among the most polluted in the world.
Human waste, including excreta, was the chief culprit and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s launch of the Swatch Bharat was aimed at reversing this.
Tomar said one of the first strategies employed by Smart City Indore, working in collaboration with the city’s municipal corporation (IMC), was to go door-to-door and speak with the people who live, work, and contribute to Indore’s daily output of over 1 million metric tonnes of solid waste.
“We recognised from early on in the project, in 2015, that we had to change the mindset of the producers of this waste and get their buy-in to the concept of effective and efficient collection and recycling of solid waste,” CEO Singh said.
[caption id="attachment_1066062" align="alignnone" width="768"] Latin American and Caribbean journalists look at the model of bio-CNC recycling plant in Indore. - Photo by Ken Chee Hing[/caption]
It was not an easy task, Tomar interjected, especially as for decades – given its brutal and dehumanising colonial past – average Indians were deeply mistrustful of officialdom.
“But we persevered and with 800 volunteers doing one-to-one interaction, we gained the faith of the public. We hired expert NGOs to do a comprehensive city profiling so we could better understand the scope of work we had to undertake,” Tomar said.
One of the ways Indore Smart City and the IMS (Indore Municipal Corporation) were able to change the mindset of the people was to formulate and implement a system to take complaints from the public and action them within a specified time frame.
“When they saw we were serious not only about dealing with them but also listening to them, listening to their complaints and their solutions, the public bought in fully into the concept of proper waste
