Context

• South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) took the radical step of issuing notices to a slew of residents who did not segregate their household waste—perhaps, the first time any civic body in the country has launched an attempt to impose fines on citizens.

India’s Waste Problem

• India’s cities already generate over 150,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste every day, with Mumbai being the world’s fifth most wasteful city.
• The waste heaps that dot the edges of India’s cities are set to double in size by 2025.
• Only one-third of the waste undergoes even rudimentary treatment, according to the urban ministry’s optimistic assessment, and hardly any of it is segregated, which would make processing easier.
• As India’s economic growth accelerates, the garbage problem would only get bigger, unless immediate solutions are found to delink growth from garbage generation.
• According to the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, cities are already beginning to run out of land on which to dump their waste and have begun throwing it in the backyards of smaller towns, suburbs and villages.
• Thus, garbage may soon become a flashpoint that sets off recurrent conflict across the urban landscape.

Suggested Solutions:

• The only big national idea on offer has been to incinerate or burn the garbage. That is what the NITI Aayog had proposed in its medium-term three-year vision for the country, which was released in August 2017.
• Apart from incineration, the other big idea that several cities have tried is bioremediation, which effectively involves the use of living micro-organisms to degrade the contaminants in a landfill into less toxic forms.
• This technology is somewhat effective in dealing with existing landfills, in an ideal future, the waste processing chain should abolish the need for a landfill to begin with.
• That is the path that several smaller Indian towns have already embarked on—from Alappuzha in Kerala to Mysuru in Karnataka, both of which endeavour to build a “zero landfill” city.
• Segregation and composting are a big part of the mix of solutions that are being implemented.
• Finally there is a need to change the public mood towards waste generation and waste management. Hopefully,heaping garbage dumps would act as a catalyst for making public realise about the severity of situation.

Conclusion:

• The Swachh Bharat Mission, the hope was that it would serve as India’s trigger. Four years down the line, nothing much has changed. But the time has come to do something. And quickly. Indians should start demanding clean and healthy cities as a basic right and governments must step up and deliver that basic human need.