Journey of India's cleanest city - Indore

 

Being crowned 4th time in a row, this city of central India's Malwa region, Indore, has set up standards which every city in India will look forward to achieve.

Thanks to my professor last trimester  in IIT Jodhpur, Dr. Anand Krishnan Plappally, he made us do some assignments quite regularly of which one was the case study of Indore's solid waste management. 

Being a curious guy I took a lot of interest in knowing the various aspects of it.

so i will let you know the story of Indore becoming the cleanest city of India

Backdrop 

After coming into power in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi started one of his most ambitious scheme which was going to change thinking of a billion minds(hopefully) and changed the fortune of some cities, one such was Indore. Being ranked on 25th position on the list of cleanest cities, the municipal corporation and the district administration of Indore could have gone happy about things but they did exact opposite. As the rankings didn't really reflected the problems Indore was facing in solid waste management.

There were many different problems on many scales in different sectors of waste collection and waste management like 

• Municipal waste management systems and processes were not in place
  
  
• Infrastructure was negligible.
  
  
• There were no material recovery facilities, transfer stations and processing units.
  
  
• Composting facilities were non-operational.
  
  
• Unorganized trenching grounds had over 13 lakh tons of legacy of waste, which was causing methane-induced fires, bad odour, and attracted disease-causing insects. 
  
  
• Only about 5 per cent of the city saw door-to-door waste collection with no source segregation.
  
  
  
  
  
•  Unorganized collection, transportation and dumping of faecal sludge was also rampant.
  
  
• There was no political awareness. There was also no awareness about solid waste management(SWM) processes in local media, as well as among the local administration and resident welfare associations (RWAs).

So after reading the previous few lines you could imagine how different was the situation compared to now.

So what was the initiation ...??

Indore’s rural district marched ahead to become the second open defecation free district in India in 2016. 

This achievement made Indore’s municipal administration introspect and challenge itself to turn the city into the cleanest one in the country. 

Municipal Commissioner Manish Singh, and later Asheesh Singh, galvanised the entire corporation towards achieving this goal.

JOURNEY TO THE "CLEANEST CITY"

In order to change the things on a massive scale the thinking and the habits of the common population needs to be addressed, IMC also that is, 

1. Making them keep separate bins for dry, wet, and hazardous waste (such as sanitary napkins, diapers, etc.). 
2. They also had to develop a consciousness and a habit of not littering in public places
   

Indore took multiple steps to motivate people into adopting clean habits:

• Free distribution of dustbins in wards/households, wherever there was high resistance by citizens.
• The Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) involved 850 Self-Help Groups, comprising almost 8,500 women, in spreading awareness for source segregation at home, conducting mass campaigns, including material recovery facility centres.
  
  
  
  
  
• Composting awareness campaigns, which resulted in more than 50,000 households doing home composting, by converting kitchen waste into compost.
  
  
  
  
  
• Imposing fines for non-segregation of waste at home, and public littering.
• A ‘dustbin free city’ initiative was taken up, and special emphasis was laid on investigation of waste to ascertain where the waste came from And indeed, in a short span of time, Indore became a dustbin-free city. 
  
  
  
  
  
• The competition to become a clean city triggered internal competition among the corporators to become the number one clean ward.

How waste is being treated ..??

• 100 per cent of household waste in Indore is segregated at the source, and then taken to transfer stations for final processing and disposal. Ten ultra-modern mechanised transfer stations have been established in different parts of the city.
  
  
  
  
  
• A collection and transportation app was developed to ensure the digitisation of the entire process, from door-to-door segregation to final disposal of the waste. This also ensured 100 per cent data management in the form of digital file formats, that includes all registers of segregated waste and citizen feedback.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Wet waste management techniques have been linked to its public transport as well. A bio-CNG plant with a capacity of 200 tonnes per day, which converts wet waste through biomethanisation process, was established. Today, giving Bio-CNG fuel for around 15 buses.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• A dry waste processing plant with a capacity of 300 tonnes per day has been established on public-private partnership (PPP) mode. A construction and demolition (C&D) waste plant with a capacity of 100 tonnes per day has also been established, which takes care of the waste generated in municipal limits. This C&D waste is reused to make non-structural concrete, paving blocks, lower layers of road payments, etc.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Through the process of bioremediation, Indore’s dumping yard has been converted into a green belt. Hundred percent legacy waste has been remediated, and 100 acres of land worth Rs 300 crore has been reclaimed.
  
  
  
  
  
• There is a proposal to develop a golf course and a city forest on the reclaimed land. The place that once used to be the source of a horrible stench is now where VIPs throng to have a cup of tea. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

thanks to the valiant effort of citizens of Indore along with the administration of IMC and the various government agencies who did their part in making Indore a height to achieve for all the places of India going through similar problems 

Where there is a will there is a way