Trash driving
- The Hindu Cartloads of garbage being taken to the collection centre. Photo: Keya Acharya
- The Hindu Warangal's ancient marketplace, still in use, now sends its waste for vermicomposting. Photo: Keya Acharya
- The Hindu Commissioner Yadav: Keeping track of things. Photo: Keya Acharya
- The Hindu Plastics ready for recycling. Photo: Keya Acharya
- The Hindu Lakshmi, a ragpicker, is now out of a job. Photo: Keya Acharya
- The Hindu Sorting out the waste. Photo: Keya Acharya
Can the IPL format be used to keep our cities clean? It certainly
seems so, after witnessing a government-sponsored sporting event that
generated public enthusiasm for a most unlikely cause.
It was a competition. An amazing total of 386 teams,
from 57 municipalities and taluk panchayats in 10 districts of the
Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh. The arena, for a period of seven
days, was historic Warangal city — the seat of the Kakatiya rulers from
the 12th-14th centuries, the remains of their majestic fort lying like
resplendent Roman ruins in the heart of today’s city.
A
few kilometres away from these ruins, a unique sporting competition was
underway. The teams represented a unique effort in training and
awareness-building on the correct methods of segregating, recycling,
dumping and composting municipal solid wastes (MSW). They were now
gearing up to compete for the best-performance prize.
The
rules of the game were elaborate. Each participating municipality sent
their best staff, a Sanitation Inspector as Team Leader, a Route Manager
and two staff members for waste-collection. Warangal city, as the host
municipality, provided three select staff members per team, both for
local help and their own training.
Intense activity
There
was intense activity for three weeks before the competition. Waste
collection centres were identified, route maps decided, local staff
trained in door-to-door collection, weighing, sorting… the entire
process worked out for a city of six lakh, producing 300 metric tonnes
of MSW daily. Each team had to cover 500 households daily.
Stainless
steel pushcarts holding large bags (for plastics) and buckets (for wet
waste) went out each morning, from 7.00 a.m. to 11.00 a.m., to the
city’s 53 sectors, accompanied by activists explaining segregation to
householders.
The waste was then wheeled into
collection centres for weighing and loading. Plastics went to a storage
yard for baling and collection by recycling units and wet wastes to
Warangal’s 39-acre dumpsite at Marikonda, 15 km outside the city.
“We
wanted to harness the spirit of competition and sportsmanship that
India displays in cricket for public health,” says Uday Singh, the ‘hub
man’ of the operations. He got the idea while watching an IPL game in
Mysore.
In IPL cricket, says Singh, individual teams
from different areas form, and play, in leagues called a ‘round robin.’
The last two winning leagues then vie with each other for the best team.
Singh followed the IPL method by asking each municipality to send their
best men (“We’re too new to deal with accommodation and logistics for
women,” he says), thereby simulating winning leagues in the lower rungs.
Singh
first discussed this idea of using the IPL sporting method with three
other activists — Sanjay Gupta, Suresh Bhandari and Muthu Kumar Swamy —
and the quartet went to the Andhra Pradesh Government.
That
there is still some verve left in the governance system is evident from
what followed. The force for the initiative, named ‘Clean Cities
Championships’, came from AP’s Joint Director of Municipal
Administration, Khadar Saheb, a man with a reputation for getting things
done. Under Saheb, Suryapet in Nalgonda district became India’s first
‘waste-compliant’ city in 2003. Saheb took the championship idea to AP’s
Director of Municipal Administration, B. Janardhan Reddy, who
immediately went to the Pollution Control Board (APSCB) for money to
conduct the event. APSCB responded, equally dynamically, with Rs. 24
lakhs.
Then, a young IAS officer, Warangal’s
31-year-old Municipal Commissioner Vivek Yadav, agreed to prepare for
and host the show in a month’s time. “I found this an opportunity to
learn more; I too wanted to know how to get segregation and disposal
done”, Yadav said.
Yadav flagged off the event
by cycling 10 km in heavy rains, much to the chagrin of his obviously
older aides who had no recourse but to follow suit.
Amid
the ancient, winding streets of Warangal, the sound of the team’s
whistle in the mornings brought housewives to their gates with their
segregated garbage. At Kumarapalli, 61-year-old Sultana Begum and her
tenant, 32-year-old Rani, were unsure about what happened to their
segregated waste, but they had no hesitation in deciding that what was
happening was a good thing, a sentiment echoed by people throughout
Warangal.
At Machhli Bazaar, which was once —
according to a map of the Archaeological Survey of India — a frontier
village inside the old Kakatiya fort, the town’s water-tower premises
now holds a collection and weighing centre. Teams with loaded hand carts
came into the compound to have their collected waste weighed and
stored, and left again for the next round, monitored by sanitation
inspectors. ‘Visiting’ staff at the collection centre were a mix of
municipal tractor drivers, cleaners and garbage municipal staff.
“The
aim,” said Khadar Saheb, “is to train all municipal staff so that they
go back to their constituencies and spread awareness”. Each
municipality’s commissioner was invited to come observe the proceedings
for at least two days. Each team was observed and rated daily on
performance in collection, segregation, awareness dissemination, and
issues such as hygiene and cleanliness. Daily data was collated every
evening at the municipality offices and judged by a team of experts
after a week.
Sixteen-year-old Purnachandra,
an NCC cadet volunteer accompanying the team at sector 49, with form and
pencil in hand, looked too young to be doing the rating. “I don’t
judge,” he explained. “I was trained to give one mark if they have their
caps on, one mark if they have their gloves on and so on.”
The
most serious drawback was the exclusion of Warangal’s ragpickers, who
unwittingly found themselves out of a job, with segregated dry wastes
now going to municipal collection centres. At sector 49, 22-year-old
Lakshmi looked both miserable and hungry. “I don’t know what to do,” she
lamented, a baby on her hip. “No paper, no plastics, and no money.”
Uday
Singh said the ragpicking community would be inducted into the
collection process at the plastics centre in due time, though a more
inclusive process would have been to include them initially. Saheb
agreed, when queried about the exclusion of a community from their only
means of livelihood.
There were also
roadblocks from vested interest lobbies and entrenched mindsets. At
Warangal’s dry resource centre, the sanitary inspector on duty looked
disgruntled at the plastics being baled. When asked for his view of the
proceedings, his expression changed to disgust. “Too risky,” he said,
his distaste at his ‘new’ job overriding his need for caution in front
of an audience. An aide whispered snidely that the man had never had to
work so hard before. “They come for work at 9.30 a.m. or so, sign their
registers and leave for the day by 11.00 a.m.,” complained the young
aide. Elsewhere, a senior health officer was disgruntled at having to
change old methods. Her comment that things would go back to ‘normal’
once everyone left after a week reached her bosses’ ears.
Determined to carry on
But
Commissioner Yadav and Joint Director Khadar Saheb took this negativity
with quiet composure and an underlying determination to carry on. Yadav
said that spokes in the process would be handled, and key persons
posing problems would be shifted.
Still, the
enthusiasm and determination behind the event was more contagious than
any rotting waste or negativity could ever be. Almitra Patel, who filed a
case in the Supreme Court in 1996 that led to India’s Municipal Solid
Waste rules and now a member of the SC’s MSW committee, worked overtime
to arrange for an entrepreneur to showcase his garbage-sorting machine
at Warangal’s dumpsite. The machine, from JK Engineering in Maharashtra,
digs up garbage landfills, then chops and sorts out plastics in one
stream and nearly-composted garbage in another, freeing ;up precious
dumpsite lands and providing compost to boot. Patel called the machine’s
reception a ‘thundering success’.
The
championship trophy, meanwhile, was won by Khammam municipality, though
there were several prizes for other teams as well. “There are no losers
here,” said Singh.
There are plans to take
the championships to Guntur, Anantapur and Tirupati, to begin with.
Singh said one strategy for longevity is that all participating
municipal commissioners will now issue orders for mandatory segregation,
recycling and composting in their jurisdictions.
“I
will file a writ of mandamus,” said a determined Singh, “pointing out
the MSW rules for which training has been given and awareness conducted,
so we are petitioning the court to ensure its implementation”.
Mandamus
or not, the ‘Warangal Premier League’ could well set an example for the
rest of India. A 2011 estimate found the country generated 68.8 million
tonnes of MSW in urban areas. That figure will become 920 million
tonnes in a decade, posing mind-boggling problems for our
already-deteriorating cities.
Warangal,
meanwhile, is now clean. Old circular dumping bins have now become
tree-holding pots. The streets are free of waste, with debris used to
fill up potholes. What started as sport has ended up serving society.
For more information, call Commissioner Yadav at 9701-999-753, or Jt. Dir. Khadar Saheb at 9949-683-331.
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