INDORE – This is a city in west-central India, with a population of about 3.5 million – more than 12 times that of Barbados. And parts of it are virtually litter-free.
Despite the bustling streets and the hive of activity, you are hard-pressed to find a bottle, candy wrapping, a used shopping bag on the streets of Indore.
For the seventh year in a row, Indore has been ranked as India’s cleanest city. But it hasn’t always been this way. When the central government’s annual Swachh Survekshan Awards began in 2016, Indore was 25th in the rankings. Choking air pollution, illegal dumping, open defecation – that was more like it in Indore.
Then came the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) with a solid waste management system, gaining buy-in from the fast-growing city’s people. The result was a 180-degree turnaround. For the CEO of Indore Smart City Development Limited, Divyank Singh, the switch is not only a source of pride but also a model for other cities and countries in the developing world grappling with solid waste management challenges.
“Some of the concepts can be handpicked from here and whatever can be implemented at [their] pace can be taken from here,” he told a gathering of senior journalists from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) who visited Indore on Thursday as part of a Ministry of External Affairs-organised tour of the nation that last year overtook China as the world’s most populous country.
There are lessons in Indore’s journey, though it was plotted specifically for the largest and most populated city in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
Just over 1 100 metric tonnes of garbage is generated daily by Indore’s households and businesses. And every day, a door-to-door service – started in January 2016 as a pilot project and now covering 100 per cent of the city – collects that waste.
Shraddha Tomar, an IMC solid waste management expert, stresses that getting public support for the waste management plan was a crucial step.
“We had to gain their faith,” she says.
Before the system was rolled out for a monthly charge for each household, IMC launched numerous awareness campaigns to educate the public on the importance of waste segregation and cleanliness. NGOs were also involved and went door-to-door to make people aware of handing over their garbage directly to the municipality vehicles. Community involvement grew and with it, support for the city’s waste management programme.
Even so, there is strict monitoring and enforcement. Regular inspections, fines, and incentives ensure compliance with waste management rules. There are fines for spitting on roads, urinating in the open, and littering.
But according to Singh and Tomar, the pride of living in India’s cleanest city is a big part of residents’ motivation to follow waste segregation and disposal guidelines. The feedback of citizens and field assessments are the criteria on which cleanliness is measured in the Swachh Survekshan Awards.
Indore’s mandatory waste segregation policy requires households to separate waste into six categories – domestic hazardous waste, plastic waste, dry waste, wet (biodegradable) waste, electronic waste and sanitary waste.
Dry waste is processed separately, with some recycled and some disposed of in one of two engineered landfills. The wet waste eventually reaches a state-of-the-art waste processing facility, which includes a composting plant and Asia’s largest bio-compressed natural gas (bio-CNG) plant. The biofuel is used in buses and trucks. IMC has already earned carbon credits by replacing diesel buses with CNG, among other initiatives. Apart from bio-CNG, the plant generates 15 tons of carbon dioxide and 100 tons of organic manure as by-products.
A positive spinoff of bio-CNG generation is cleaner air, thanks to lower fossil fuel use.
Even before hearing Tomar and Singh boast about the air quality, the difference is – literally – clear. Contrast Indore with the national capital New Delhi and its trademark grey haze. There, the heaviness of the air is not only seen but felt with every deep breath. Here up north, those grey skies give way to bright blue and white clouds no different from
Barbados’ – and a much lighter weight on the chest.
In Indore, garbage used to be dumped in a place called the “trenching ground”. The name stuck but the area is unrecognisable from what a visitor would have seen in 2015, we are told. Tonnes of legacy waste have been remediated. A hundred acres of land has been reclaimed. The trenching ground has been replaced by a city forest and the bio-CNG plant.
And there are improvements still to be made in the system, some identified by residents who use the Indore Smart City’s award-winning app to give feedback on the solid waste management system, says Tomar.
Though IMC has been sharing its gains, she admits that some of its
initiatives would be difficult to implement in countries like the Caribbean.
But she is quick to add that it need not be an all-or-nothing scenario. Though the current system is customised to meet Indore’s needs, other cities and countries can benefit from some of the concepts, she asserts.
The story of Indore Smart City goes beyond waste disposal management, though.
This is just one aspect of an urban ecosystem that aims to integrate digital
technology, knowledge and assets, to become more responsive to citizens and improve city services.
Smart City Indore also features an integrated traffic management system that includes automatic identification of traffic violators, solar power plants on terraces and roofs, built-heritage conservation and heritage street development.
It all began with meeting people where they were, sharing a vision and listening to what they had to say. In Indore, they can see clearly now.
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