Kerala’s Alappuzha among 5 cities managing waste efficiently

The only Indian town in the new UN Environment report is Alappuzha in Kerala. The UN report states that if cities in India wanted to take up the Swachh Bharat cause, all they had to do is follow the lead of ‘progressive municipalities like Alappuzha’.

However, this town is ranked 380 in the Swachh Survekshan 2017, a survey ranking 500 Indian cities and conducted by the ministry of urban development under the Central government. Indore and Bhopal top the list, followed by Vishakhapatnam and Surat. Is something amiss?

The UN Environment report lists Alappuzha alongside Osaka in Japan, Ljubljana in Slovenia, Penang in Malaysia and Cajica in Colombia. The report underlines how these cities are fulfilling the UN Environment Programme’s goal of tackling air, water and soil pollution by scientifically disposing off waste.

The UN report states that a few years ago, roadsides and canals filled with stinking garbage in the town and it threatened Alappuzha’s tourism market. Protests by local residents led to the closure of the town’s main landfill site at Sarvodayapuram in 2012. According to the report, the city addressed the problem by introducing a decentralised waste management system. This separates out biodegradable waste at ward level, treats it in small composting plants, and provides many of its 1,74,000 residents with biogas for cooking.

In Alappuzha, the project was taken up under the ‘Nirmala Bhavanam, Nirmala Nagaram (Clean Home, Clean City)’ project, where the municipality installed biogas plants, pipe compost units in households and aerobic composting units in public places. The municipality does not collect waste door-to-door anymore.

The plastic waste is separately collected once a month by the municipality officials and can be given to either private companies for recycling or to the state government’s Clean Kerala Company which sells it to factories in other states. The construction waste is used for filling marsh land.

However, according to reports, officials in Indore, which tops the Swachh Survekshan 2017 list, razed down homes of people who didn’t have toilets at home. A housing group claimed that more than 700 such households were demolished between December 2016 and mid-February 2017, before officials of the Swachh Survekshan team visited the town. Indore had achieved the ‘open defecation free’ label by showing that most houses in the city have toilets.

The performance of each city was evaluated on five key thematic parameters: Municipal solid waste (MSW) – sweeping, collection and transportation; processing and deposal of waste; Open defecation free/toilets; Building capacity and e-learning; and IEC or information, education and communication.

Surat, which is ranked fourth on the list dumps 1,600 tonnes of unsegregated, unprocessed garbage in a landfill every day.

According to Swachh Survekshan report, cities were scrutinised on their level of preparedness on the basis of cleanliness and sanitation, and municipal documentation. The Survekshan methodology was trifurcated into following parts: municipal documentation, independent observation and citizen feedback. Even the Centre for Science and Environment pointed out the error in the approach. The government survey gave importance to cities which focussed on landfills and waste-to-energy plants, ignoring decentralised approaches such as waste segregation, and recycling and reuse.