The Solid Waste Management (SWM) strategy seems to be one area where the Draft RMP 2031 makes all the right noises and adoption of best practices.

On a positive note, the draft plan expands the SWM strategy – segregation of waste at source, separation of bulk waste – to the surrounding villages in the Bengaluru Metropolitan Area (BMA) as well.

There are two opposing views on waste management: one argues that composting of wet waste has been a failure and advocates complete shift to Waste-to-Energy plants while others see them as polluting and non-viable.

The plan attempts to strike a balance by proposing eight Integrated Waste Processing Plants in addition to upgrading the nine running today.

These plants will incorporate both composting and WtE technology.

Organic waste is first composted, but the RDF it generates, along with other combustible non-biodegradable waste, will be incinerated to produce power using WtE technology, the plan suggests.

N.S. Ramakanth, member, SWM Committee, says this is an acceptable strategy.

The draft plan also incorporates the recent High Court direction for implementation of a micro plan and decentralised processing of waste. It recommends 12 bio-methanisation plants of five TPD capacity and 85 Organic Waste Converters of 1 TPD capacity for the entire BMA.

However, the draft plan has been criticised for what many see as ‘token’ recommendations.

Ramprasad, an Solid Waste Management activist, said that in a decentralisation model, every ward within BBMP limits and their equivalent outside must have smaller Organic Waste Converters, and that the proposed 85 will not be sufficient even for the BBMP area. He estimates that the city will need 300 converters by 2031.

Also, the plan does not stress on separating various streams of waste, like construction debris, animal waste, sanitary waste and other hazardous waste, and doesn’t provide strategies for processing such waste.

GHMC is experimenting with the idea of community resource persons in order to take the solid waste management in the city to next level. The corporation has recently recruited a large number of community resource persons (CRPs) to spread the awareness about the importance of waste segregation among households.

A total of 3,600 CRPs will cover some 15 lakh households in the city and spread the message of waste segregation and against indiscriminate dumping of waste on roads and in storm water drains. Each CRP has to visit 600 households for which she will be paid an honorarium of Rs. 10,000 based on her performance.

Accountability will be ensured by way of paying the remuneration only after the sanitation staff of the area concerned certify the performance of the CRP. The sanitation worker who runs the garbage auto-trolley will have to confirm that more households are handing over the garbage to them rather than throw it on roads, and more are segregating the wet and dry waste than before, GHMC Commissioner B. Janardhan Reddy said.

Large scale recruitment of CRPs followed the success achieved in the first two spells as part of the ‘Swachh Bharat’ campaign. In the first phase, eighty-five CRPs were recruited to cover 52,000 households, and in the second, 153 more were recruited to educate the residents living by the storm water drains not to throw garbage into the drains.