Clean transformation: Indian city winning war on waste
Fruit seller Neeraj Karat is proud of his city. This was not the case just four years ago, when a large heap of garbage was part of the landscape just a few hundred metres from his stall in Jabalpur.
“There was a pile of waste on the next roundabout. Passersby would hold their noses when they walked by it,” Mr Karat recalls, pointing toward the roundabout in the central Indian city.
Even Mr Karat and other fruit vendors did not use waste baskets, but that has now become a habit. “Please drop your banana peels here,” he advises a visitor, pulling a wooden basket from under his stall.
In Jabalpur, residents do not wake up to the chiming of temple bells, mobile alarms or chirping of birds. They wake to the sounds of sanitation workers who visit each of the 276,000 households registered with the Municipal Corporation to collect garbage.
The workers collect the garbage and scan the RFID (radio frequency identification) tags pasted on the walls of the households with hand-held readers. The units transmit data to the municipal control centre and ensure that no household remains unattended.
To make sure collection goes smoothly, the city has been divided into 15 zones, with each one headed by a chief sanitary inspector.
The collected household garbage is then transported to some 300 community bins. including 50 semi-underground bins fitted with sensors. Once they are filled beyond 90% of their capacity, they send out automated alert messages to the command centre.
The centre in turn alerts its collection trucks, or tippers, located near the bins. The 250 tippers are fitted with GPS devices to help with communication and route optimisation. They arrive blaring a Hindi song which loosely translates into “a wave of cleanliness is blowing across cities and streets”.
The tippers and trucks carry the garbage to segregation sites and from there to a waste-to-energy plant that has been run on the outskirts of the city by Essel Group since May 2016. The plant can burn 600 tonnes of waste a day to produce 11.5 Megawatts of electricity.
This new source of power generation has led to a reduction of approximately 37,000 tonnes of carbon emissions in Jabalpur. The plant uses 15% of the electricity for its operation and exports the rest to the state grid.
Representatives of a number of Indian cities and foreign countries have visited the plant, run on Japanese technology, to see whether they can emulate it. A delegation from Thailand visited in 2017, says Sanjay Kumar, a mechanical engineer from Aligarh who is in charge of the plant.
The plant sells all of its fly ash to a nearby construction and development plant, where it is used for making bricks. The waste burning also produces 25% bottom ash which can be used for filling land and for water-bound macadam road construction.
However, the waste-to-energy plant has to shut down occasionally because Jabalpur produces only 500 tonnes of waste a day, 100 tonnes less than what is required to run the plant. As a result, the municipal corporation is looking to source waste from the neighbouring district of Narsinghpur, according to Health Officer Bhupendra Singh Baghel.
“We have signed a contract with Narsinghpur for garbage,” he told Asia Focus.
Since 2016, a smart city project has also been under way in Jabalpur. The central and state governments have allocated one billion rupees (around US$14 million) each to the city annually for area-based development and pancity solutions. The latter involves the use of technology such as RFID, GPS and sensors, with the data collected helping to improve the quality of infrastructure and services.
Besides the waste-to-energy plant and the construction and development plant, Jabalpur has three large sewage treatment plants and about half a dozen smaller ones. As well, it has a water treatment plant to treat waste water and rain water. The treated water is used for irrigating crops.
The Urban Development Ministry has been conducting quarterly cleanliness surveys since 2016 in India’s cities. Jabalpur was ranked 21st on a list of 450 cities in 2017. A year later, according to Mr Baghel, it was 25th position on an expanded list of 4,500 cities. It hopes to improve its position further in the October-December 2019 cleanliness survey, the results for which are expected soon.
“We do expect to improve our position,” said Mayor Swati Sadanand Godbole. She has been a key proponent of the cleanliness drive in a five-year term that ends this week.
Indore, another city in Madhya Pradesh state, has consistently ranked first in the central government’s cleanliness surveys. In the April-June 2019 quarter, it was followed by Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, while in July-September 2019, Rajkot in Gujarat state was second.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Clean India Mission on Oct 2, 2014, the birthday of independence leader Mohandas Gandhi. The campaign ended on Oct 2, 2019, the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Mahatma.
Garbage trucks in Jabalpur arrive blaring a Hindi song that proclaims “a wave of cleanliness is blowing across cities and streets”