How Indore became India’s Cleanest City!
Sustainability
Indore has been declared the cleanest city of India for the 4th consecutive year in the Swachh Survekshan Annual Cleanliness Survey 2020.
Indore houses more than 3 million people, who produce over 1200 tonnes of waste on a daily basis.
What did the municipal corporation do right to achieve success consecutively? Is this model scalable for states like Delhi? Let’s discuss.
Sweeping into the Night
Indore has an army of 8500+ sweepers for all the areas in the city except for wider roads. Roads are swept using advanced machines every night after the city sleeps. Commercial areas are swept twice or thrice a day while residential areas once a day.
Segregation at Source
Indore has achieved marvelous success with its GPS-enabled door-to-door garbage pickup, which uses 470+ specially designed vehicles with three separate compartments for kitchen waste, dry waste and hazardous waste (diapers, sanitary napkins, etc.), ensuring segregation at source.
From Waste to Wealth
2 dry waste handling plants convert 600 tonnes of solid waste every day into manure for farmers, methane to produce electricity and high calorific value fuel for various industries. A portion of productive waste is used to create landfills and saplings are planted in them, resulting in beautiful parks.
What makes Indore unique?
The municipal corporation has implemented a lot of policies at the ground level. For example — Indore became ODF (Open Defecation Free) in 2017 itself by building 12k+ public toilets, something that is a problem mainly in the outskirts and skips visual observation.
Can this model be scaled up?
Let us take Delhi as an example and explore this using three different factors.
Accountability:
Delhi has been split into three municipal corporations. Since the Indore model is a municipal corporation level model, every corporation can implement the same model individually, solving the problem for accountability and decentralization in a larger state.
Infrastructure and Resources:
Since tier-1 cities have larger budgets, infrastructure development and human resources should not be a hindrance either. Larger transfer stations can be constructed for larger populations.
However, waste treatment plants will still remain a challenge considering the fact that they might have to be shared among the three municipal corporations (to make the model most cost-effective).
Awareness:
The most important factor in favour of tier-1 cities is that people are more aware, cleanliness driven and health conscious, which makes gathering their support for initiatives like eradication of open defecation and waste segregation easier.
In a diverse country like India, every city will have its own set of challenges. However, with right modifications, this model can be implemented, scaled-up or scaled-down everywhere.
Other pluses
The door-to-door waste collection mechanism has provided the Indore municipal corporation with a route map for other operations as well. Indore has been tremendously successful with tackling COVID-19 pandemic by using these route maps to conduct door-to-door health surveys and grocery deliveries. These route maps are expected to be extremely handy when vaccines will have to be administered to the residents of the city.