The image that is most associated with Swacch Bharat is of VIPs wielding brooms to sweep the dirt or garbage in the streets. Sweeping streets with brooms only touches the tip of the problem, especially if there is no mechanism to dispose of what is swept up. The way to keep a city clean is to ensure that segregated waste is collected from homes and commercial establishments, and after providing for recycling and resource recovery, what is left is disposed of scientifically.

Itanagar managed to shrug-off its ‘dirty’ tag but this is really no time to become complacent as the realization of a truly clean city is still a distant dream.

Waste management is not about moving garbage from where it is visible to a secluded spot. Just because you cannot see, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Segregating biodegradable and non -degradable garbage is the crux of waste management. 

 While the Solid Waste Rules of 2016 and the MSW Rules of 2000 call for “primary” door-to-door collection of waste segregated at source, most municipal corporations and municipalities only make “secondary” collection of unsegregated waste from community bins. The focus of Swacch Bharat should, therefore, be on motivating and nudging people to reduce their waste and segregate it into wet, dry, recyclables, etc, and for the municipalities to collect this waste and put it through separate treatment streams for resource recovery and dispose of the residue scientifically.

Community bins are temporary dumpsites from where the waste is removed ever so often and is taken to permanent dumpsites either inside our cities or at their outskirts. Garbage is stacked at these sites for months, years and even decades. They are mistakenly called “landfills” but are better described as “garbage hills” and are huge public health hazards. If we focus only on clearing the community bins in different localities but not on what needs to be done with the waste from that point onwards, we will only make the garbage hills around us higher and will not create swacch cities.

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