Trade-Offs by Mridula Ramesh: When it comes to trash, one way or another, we will pay

“Why should waste bother me?” A young woman from Narimedu in Madurai, answering our opening question with a rhetorical one. “My wife keeps my house clean,” says a middle-aged man who worked as an auto driver. “We have no problem,” adds a grandmother, smiling. “We gather all our waste and burn it.”
These were some of the responses to the first question, “Does waste bother you?”, in our six-year investigation into the waste and water reality of over 2,300 Madurai residents.
Overall, a third of our respondents told us that waste did not bother them. The problem is, if something doesn’t bother someone, they won’t take the effort to manage it. Then, when a city ward tries to segregate its waste, if a third of the families toss their diapers, chips packets, rags and broken glass into the biodegradable bin, the ward’s waste management is doomed.
What gets recycled will then depend solely on the discretion of the waste picker. And she will pick out only those things that have a ready market: PET bottles, high-quality plastic and metal. The rest will go to a landfill, or more likely into a stream or nullah, or will be burnt furtively at night.
And this way of handling waste will return to haunt us.
Most of India’s annual rainfall falls in just 100 hours. This year, Delhi received over a quarter of its annual rainfall in just three days. This isn’t an anomaly any more. In this decade, Delhi has received nearly 30% of its yearly rainfall over just a few days each year. A warming climate intensifies rainfall while reducing rainy days, essentially guaranteeing flooding. Especially when rubbish clogs what little drainage exists.
It is algebra at its most elegant: Intense rainfall + Clogged drain = Flooding. Delhi’s latest tragedy reveals the truth of this equation. Which is why my Sundaram Climate Institute, which works in the field of urban climate adaptation, studies waste and water solutions. They are joined at the hip when it comes to building climate-resilient cities.
So, what to do?
A Chinese proverb goes: “If you want to know the path to success, ask those walking back.” The top 10 Swachh Survekshan 2023 cities show that while there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for waste management, as much as good health is about food, exercise, sleep and lowered stress, some pillars are vital. A city must have sufficient and well-managed infrastructure, citizen buy-in (especially for segregation), robust destinations for collected waste (think, biogas plants), and citizens must pay for these services.
Let me begin with citizen buy-in. This means that most people (if not everyone) must agree that waste management is worthwhile. But half our survey respondents responded to “What is your role in managing waste?” with “No comment”, “I don’t know” or an enigmatic smile.
When we asked the same group if they knew what segregation meant, three-quarters said yes. Before you applaud, less than a fifth of these individuals had received any waste-segregation training. So we weren’t surprised that only 20 of 2,389 said their waste management role was to segregate their waste.
When I shared these results with experts who had spent their lives researching solid-waste management, they said this sounded depressingly accurate.
Srikanth Viswanathan, CEO of Janaagraha, an NGO that works in urban governance, said, “Governments often use high-level campaigns to try and change behaviour. Those simply don’t work. We need formal platforms like ward committees and area sabhas on which citizens can engage with each other and their local representatives and assume community ownership.”
To really change thinking needs continuous show-and-tell until the change becomes ingrained. Indore did this through schools, melas, radio stations; everywhere and constantly; until it had the buy-in it needed. That takes intent. And money.
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Now to the third pillar, where good news exists. There are NGOs and start-ups working in every area of managing waste at scale. Making compost from garden waste? Check. Biogas from leftovers? Check. Incense sticks from temple flowers? Sure. Using chips packet in sturdy road surfaces? Check. High-protein chicken feed from leftover food? Yes. New yarn from fabric scrap? Certainly. Bricks and paver blocks from waste plastic and construction debris? Check. The list goes on, and is expanding daily.
Many of these segments are growing and, with new plastic-management rules, brands are on the prowl for recycled plastic. Sadly, the way we pay for our waste management today means that landfills and open drains remain the destinations of choice. This must change.
It is hard to unlock the wealth within waste without segregating at source (waste to energy is problematic given the high biodegradable content of Indian waste; AI sorting is evolving and currently works best with dry waste). So, to truly create this wealth, we need good service (so many have told me that they separate diligently, only to see the garbage collector toss it all into the same recess in the vehicle).
Good service requires adequate infrastructure and monitoring (so that, for example, the collector doesn’t just dump the waste midway) and incentives (punishment for cheating). All this takes time, which means money.
This brings us to the last pillar: Funding. Indore charges households a monthly fee (offices and apartment complexes pay slightly more) for managing their waste. Pune, which partners with a cooperative to collect waste, charges all households (even in informal neighbourhoods, though those pay a lower rate).
This payment ensures that everyone has skin in the game. But getting people to pay is not easy. When we asked “Do you pay for garbage collection, and if so, how much” we found that only 40% of households paid for waste collection, and even this was an informal sum ( ₹10 to ₹20 per month, on average) given to the waste collector in the neighbourhood.
Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
The ₹10 to ₹20 may ensure collection and dumping into the nearest drain (our respondents said many collectors did this), but not much more. There is a world of difference between collection and management. Indeed, it could be the difference between being developing and developed. And cities need money.
A 2019 paper by economist Isher Ahluwalia found that municipal revenues in India between 2007 and 2013 hovered at about 1% of GDP, in contrast to 6% in South Africa and 7.4% in Brazil. A 2022 Reserve Bank of India report on municipal finances showed that municipal revenues as a percentage of GDP had shrunk further by 2018-19, to 0.6%.
The irony is stark: As India urbanises, municipal revenue as a share of GDP is falling. Worse still, the share of municipal revenue that comes from their own earnings (essentially, levies that are paid to them directly) is also falling. This is like a person becoming poorer and more dependent over time. It’s a double blow. As municipalities increasingly rely on the largesse of the state and centre, they have less autonomy. Indore, Pune and others understood this, and began to collect fees for garbage collection.
But money, though important, is not everything.
Another study, this one a working paper by the think tank Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), found that there was more to achieving cleanliness than merely money. Leadership stability was important. Sadly, per the NGO Janaagraha, the average tenure of a municipal commissioner in most Indian cities is less than a year. (Janaagraha CEO Viswanathan tells me the situation in smaller cities is worse.) Now, that’s not enough time to get to know a city, its quirks, its power centres, its weaknesses and then begin fixing problems.
Imagine a newbie with limited funds confronting a mountain of waste, knowing full well that his transfer will come in months. Why would he resist the lure of burning? The CSEP study also found that citizen involvement and partnerships with private players were important to achieve and maintain cleanliness. And we saw how those depend on adequate financial incentives.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. We won’t pay unless we are sure the service is effective, but the service can never be effective if we don’t pay. But “intent, both political and administrative, matters,” Viswanathan says. Intent ensured that Indore broke the impasse with a pilot programme in a couple of wards, and stable leadership. But intent can translate to sustained action only when that mental switch of paying for waste collection is flipped.
While we obsess over the iPhone (Indians bought about 9.2 million of these in 2023), we don’t want to pay our property taxes (less than half of what is due is paid, per Janaagraha’s estimates) and we resist a monthly fee of ₹150 or so to manage our waste. We quibble over that fee (private players who collectively deal with thousands of households tell me we do), but are happy to fork out 58 times that sum for a gadget. No, no; these are not comparable, you say. One is a necessity, it’s about status. Status? Drains choked with litter and sediment bursting to drown three youngsters. That’s status? Really?
India aspires to be Viksit Bharat by 2047, and here, as the government has said, environmental sustainability and urban development are key goals. But these are external targets. If there is one thing I have learned, it is: As within, so without. The change will need to come from within. They’re our cities, after all.
(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watershed)