Sweeping Success
WINNER: Surat Municipal Corporation WHY IT WON: For introducing a comprehensive waste management system
AFTER THE PLAGUE scare of 1994, cleanliness became an obsession for Surat. It found itself consistently on top of the list of India’s cleanest cities. Then, complacency set in, and Surat dropped to third place in 2016 and dropped to #14 thereafter.
It was at this point that the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) woke up to the slide and set about trying to restore the city’s reputation for cleanliness. It introduced a multitiered system to collect, segregate and treat waste from construction and demolition, plastic, textile and electronic waste. Doortodoor collection was launched for industrial and commercial waste.
Waste is collected between 7 am and 3 pm daily from more than 1.2 million households in Surat and between 11 am and 4 pm from more than 200,000 commercial buildings with the help of more than 550 doortodoor collection vehicles equipped with separate compartments for wet, dry and hazardous waste. All sanitation wards are equipped with biometric attendance systems. The SMC has 22 mechanised road sweeping machines.
The city generates 1,830 MT of waste daily. Once collected and segregated, the different kinds of waste are reused and recycled—demolition waste is used to produce bricks, textile waste for making carpets and mats, and plastic waste is used to make granules. The city also has elaborate vermin composting facilities at three places and a biogas plant fuelled by organic waste with 50 MT per day capacity. Collection, treatment and disposal of biomedical waste has been given out on a BOOT (build, own, operate transfer) contract. ■