‘The public health crisis is upon us’
Three years into the much-talked about Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), very little has actually changed on the ground. ISHER JUDGE AHLUWALIA, chairperson of ICRIER and chairperson of the High Powered Expert Committee on Urban Infrastructure and Services, wh
What would you do if you were heading the Swachh Bharat Mission?
Emphasise waste to health. An awareness campaign that links disease to lack of sanitation has to be the first step, since community participation is crucial for the success of the Swachh Bharat Mission.
In India, in the small- and medium-size cities, we can avoid the mistakes we have made in our larger cities. In Swachh Bharat Mission, the cities that have excelled are cities like Mysuru, Indore, and Tirunelveli, while other small/medium cities like Pammal, Suryapet, Namakkal, Panaji, and Uttarpara had begun to clean up their act even before the Swachh Bharat Mission.
Also, we must plan and implement solid-waste management in a right way in the new cities that are coming up. Magarpatta, outside of Pune, is a good example. It would have suffered the fate of most other peripheral towns with haphazard urbanisation, except that the farmers owning that land came together to form a development company and planned and implemented the transformation of the area into a modern sustainable city, including management and safe
disposal of their solid waste in the centre of their colony. It should be possible to develop new Magarpattas across the country. But for the existing 8,000odd towns and cities in India, Magarpatta is not a solution; it is at best an inspiration.
In big cities, the legacy of a very poor management of solid waste over the years and how badly we are dealing with the current flow of solid waste need to be attended to urgently. I have not given up hope on municipal corporations. They can work and have to be made to work. Pune offers a good example of how the Pune Municipal Corporation has worked with civil society to address challenges of the solid-waste management.
Biogas can be used for cooking or street lighting. In Matheran (near Mumbai), this is being done effectively. In Malur, it is being bottled for use as compressed biogas in vehicles and distant hotels. Fortunately, in India, dry waste which is recyclable, is traditionally taken away from households by the kabadiwalas, and recycled and reused. If we stick to this good old practice, then what remains is the non-biodegradable non-recyclable waste, which is a much smaller, manageable proportion of the total solid waste.
The SBM, so far, has been rather skewed, focused only on open defecation. Your views?
Open defecation is very
important, so I wouldn’t knock that. But we must not only build more toilets, private toilets as well as community toilets, but also put in place sewerage connectivity and sewage treatment. As it is, in our cities, on average, only about 30 per cent of the sewage is treated. It is a pity that we have separated solid waste management from sewage treatment, one under the SBM and the other under AMRUT. The two missions need to come together.
I also worry about the incomplete message that the Swachh Bharat Mission conveys. The focus seems to be on litter-free cities and dust-free cities, while the importance of safe disposal of the waste is missing. I recently saw one of the campaign messages, “Apna shahar swachh banao; kuda kachra dur hatao”. My question is “dur kahan”? The kudakachra can’t vanish into thin air. If the focus is to be on swachh (clean) and swasth (healthy) Bharat, dur (far) is not enough. I don’t think the message that poor solid-waste management is a colossal health hazard is reaching the public. The Swachh Bharat’s main message should be that the price of inaction will be severe danger to our health.
How do we move to the next step: how do we get municipal corporations to do their bit once people begin to segregate waste ?
Our municipalities are not empowered and perhaps not motivated. They are supposed to manage solid waste and they take the blame when it is not done, but actually they have neither the finances nor the manpower to do the job.
Now, I know you will say they have all those safai karamcharis. But the manpower is not of the type needed — they have street sweepers, but they don’t have sufficient numbers of doorstep collectors for segregated waste, nor engineers, IT people and other skilled people who can design and manage efficient supply chains for collection, transport and processing of unmixed waste streams to achieve effective solid-waste management.
You keep saying that municipal corporations can do the job, but after 50 years, we are where we are. When will this change ?
Ever since I have started working on the challenges of urbanisation, including solid-waste management, I find this is a crisis of much greater magnitude staring us in our face. Truly speaking, the public health crisis is upon us. Today a younger India is impatient and will not wait for as long as we did for industrial liberation.