Reproduced is an extract on administration of clean cities by Dr Almitra Patel. Has anybody wondered why everyone other than these experts are involved in the Swachh Bharat campaign? A CHECK-LIST OF GUIDELINES FOR CLEAN CITIES NO GARBAGE DUMPING ON ROADS Doorstep collection of wastes daily. All wastes to be kept inside the home or work-place until the ghanti-gadi comes DO NOT MIX wet kitchen waste & dry waste. Give WET waste to ghanti – gadi daily Keep DRY waste for raddi – walas weekly: Waste paper, glass, rags, rubber, wood and plastic bags AVOID DOUBLE – HANDLING OF WASTE Do not unload any collected waste on the road. Load it directly into a trailer or vehicle for onward transport to the waste -processing site. Waste-collection hand-carts / tricycles should have buckets or bins which can be emptied directly into a waiting trailer or vehicle, to be taken away as soon as it is full. Remove all big dustbins from the road wherever possible as they are always dirty. Multi-storey apartments, shops and offices Must provide their own big bins at their gate for separate wet & dry waste, and also toxics, thus: Kitchen & Plastic bags, Batteries, bulbs Food waste plastic items, Paint & chemical Sanitary waste paper, cans/ containers, Towels/diapers cloth, metal needles, syringes DRY WASTE COLLECTION from OFFICES SHOPS, MARKETS, NON-RESIDENTIAL AREAS : Collection can be weekly or daily, but collection services should be paid for if not arranged by waste-generators themselves. GARDEN-WASTE TO BE COMPOSTED ON-SITE Specially for public parks, gardens, public bldgs or it can be collected on payment on fixed and notified days of the week or month. No private garden waste should come outside the premises onto roads or into street bins. RESTRICT CATTLE MOVEMENT ON STREETS: Animals within city limits must be only stall-feed. Clear stable wastes daily at cost. In the largest cities, relocate cattle outside. BURNING OF LEAVES IS BANNED Pile up the road-side fallen leaves and sprinkle them with cowdung-water for rapid composting, in a park or under a tree or in a vacant plot. DECENTRALISED COMPOSTING of LOCAL WET WASTE IS THE BEST WAY: 1 – 5 tons of well – segregated wet waste can be composted street-wise or Ward-wise for huge savings in transport costs. POLLUTER-PAYS PRINCIPLE for TRADE WASTE Non-residential waste need not be collected free. Municipalities need not increase “trade profits” Offices, shops, markets, stables, hostels, hotels, hospitals and others who produce waste while doing business must pay for waste removal or make their own arrangements to take their wet & dry wastes separately to a specified place. On payment, arrange special timings. Collect cooked food waste separately if possible DEBRIS MUST NOT LIE ON THE ROAD Builders must keep it within their premises until collected on payment, or dispose of it at fixed places with proof of dumping it there and not anywhere else. Charge in advance when giving Plan Sanction of reqd. NEVER MIX DEBRIS AND WET WASTE !! It will make composting very difficult. ‘PIN-POINT WORK ASSIGNMENTS for 365 – Days a Year Cleaning : Assign fixed beats for individual sweepers, to cover 150 – 250 houses + adjoining road – sweeping duty of: 300 running meters in high-density areas in morning shift 500 “ “ in medium-density areas “ “ 750 “ “ in low-density areas “ “ Cleanliness of shallow surface drains to be the routine responsibility of road – sweepers for that stretch. Similar fixed afternoon – beats for cleaning slums & roads. CLEANING OF DRAINS LESS THAN 2 FT DEEP to be the responsibility of SWM Dept. Only deeper drains + Under-Ground Drainage to be under Municipal Engineering Dept or a separate body. Desilting Norms are 500 meters / person for the first clean-up drive. DRAIN SILT NOT TO BE LEFT ON ROAD FOR drying. Load it directly the same day into hand-cart or trucks and take to transfer point. No Silt & Debris dumping at compost – plants. AVOID MANUAL UNLOADING of VEHICLES. Use tipper trucks or trailers wherever possible. Try for 80% on-road maintenance. DO NOT USE ANY PESTICIDES ON GARBAGE HEAPS !! Routine use has been banned by the Supreme Court on 28.7.1997. Uncleared garbage heaps can easily be made smell-free by Bio-treatment. Sprinkle the heaps with 5-10% cowdung solution or with a solution of readily available composting bio-cultures. Only compost-plant rejects & debris should go to covered landfills. Plan & provide for waste-yards with 20-25 years’ life, and a No – Development zone around identified waste-yards. Waste - management infrastructure should be a strict pre - condition in new development areas BEST PRACTICES FOR CLEAN CITIES Surat’s mottos: “A city is only as clean as its dirtiest area.” So officers and supervisors must spend at least 40% of their field time in slums, switching “from AC to DC” = from Air-Conditioned offices to Daily Chores. Surat has spotless dumper-placers and surroundings because of pin-point beats, in which sweepers take personal responsibility for the cleanliness of their stretch of road and any dustbins or dumper placers in their stretch. These rest on paved areas slightly higher than the road that slope towards a drain-opening nearby. Spotless streets are also seen in Chandigarh, where residents take pride in personally sweeping and washing their half of the road in front of their homes, every morning. There is Personal Responsibility by each property-owner for the cleanliness of the pavement and road in front of their properties. Every city can make this a requirement in commercial areas, where every shop-keeper must take responsibility for 24-hour cleanliness of the pavement-drain-road opposite his frontage, Commercial Street waste should be privately managed : The Bangalore Hardware Merchants’ Assn pays an NGO of women waste-pickers / slum-dwellers an annual fee (recovered from its members) for keeping their busy street litter-free all day. “Keep city streets clean by not letting them get dirty in the first place.” Nashik is a dustbinless city, as trucks move from one street-corner to another directly receiving waste from each household at fixed times In Calcutta, 93% house-to-house collection achieved at no extra cost to citizens, using only existing Municipal sweepers who blow a whistle at each gate. In Ahmedabad, ghanti-gadis (bell-carts) have four to six 25-litre containers which are emptied directly into waiting trucks or dumper-placers, avoiding manual handling of waste Weekly doorstep collection of dry wastes is done by SEWA’s rag-picker co-operative which has a hotline. (Contact SEWA, opp Victoria Gardeb, Bhadra, Ahmedabad 380001, tel 079-5506444 or 5506477) Doorstep collection of both dry and wet wastes is done for a fee at Pune, by a 5000-member rag-pickers’ union (Contact SNDT University, tel 020-347336) In Ludhiana, SJSRY groups of 20 women are directly employed by the resident groups for waste management in their colonies. The Ludhiana municipality pays the resident groups for taking responsibility for their own areas. [NOTE: Cleaning services, if contracted out, must be given only to service - providers who do this for a living. Only such schemes are viable long-term. Resident groups can also directly engage waste-management professionals or entrepreneurs who seek no grants or subsidies. “Pilot projects” that are obviously unviable, unsustainable and non-replicable even at inception, because they require grant funding for both capital as well as operating expenses, must be avoided at all costs. They are a criminal waste of national or international resources. They deceive residents of new wards/layouts into a false sense of security that conservancy services for them are permanently in place. Expensive solutions force them to get locked into unaffordable options that are inherently doomed to fail creating filthy layouts instead of clean ones.] Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation has an effective low-cost Public Awareness Campaign. Every letter or bill going out of the Municipality has one of several rubber-stamped messages like “Do not litter” “Use the ghanti-gadi” “Keep dry wastes separate from food wastes” etc on it. Children in Municipal schools have to get their parents to sign not just their monthly mark-sheet but also a checklist as well, of items similar to these rubber-stamps. Coorg District was cleaned up by having all schoolchildren bring all their dry recyclable wastes from home to school, where an NGO arranged for its purchase. Classwise funds collected were used for eco-club activities. (Contact CEE, opp The Hindu, Infantry Rd Bangalore 560001, tel 080-2862617. Fax 2868209 for video) Market waste is well-managed in Calcutta : Every truck bringing produce into the market area has to pay a clean-up fee. Trucks must unload goods in the market and also bring out any straw, baskets, boxes and packaging to be put in waiting tractor-trailers at the exit. Surat ensured that every petty shop has a waste-bucket and uses it, and that every mobile food-cart has gunnies slung beneath to collect the wastes it generates and takes them out of the area. Tender-coconut shells are collected in Bangalore in cycle-rickshaws (when not in use for school-kids) and delivered to the Police quarters where they are spread to dry and used for heating water. Rs 10 per day is collected from the coconut-vendor as well as the police families. Hotel food waste to pigs : In many metros, piggery owners pay nominal or even fancy sums to hotels for the right to collect their food wastes. Non-veg food waste is preferred. Tea leaves, coffee grounds and lime/orange peels should be kept out of waste intended for pigs, to get better prices for the waste. For controlling open defecation, Bangalore requires the construction of temporary toilets at all building sites as soon as construction work begins. Sewer lines will eventually be laid for every building. So if they are laid at the start of construction rather than last, temporary toilets can easily be installed over them when construction begins, and demolished later or kept for servants and drivers. Pay-and-use toilets are welcomed in UP as they generate precious gas as well. They are constructed with cost-sharing by slum-dwellers, and at Kanpur the UP Jal Nigam had a waiting-list for these successful schemes. BEST PRACTICES FOR COMPOSTING If Dry wastes are separated at source, composting of wet waste is much easier. Neighbourhood composting of segregated Wet wastes is done in Mumbai within an apartment complex or a lane, e.g. Joshi Lane. (Contact Viren Merchant, Shreeji Kunj, Joshi Lane, Ghatkopar E, Mumbai 400077, tel 022 - 5131293 or 98200-51312) ALM = Advanced Local Management is being done at 400 such societies in Mumbai, helped by a special Municipal officer, has reduced wastes to 10% of former levels (Contact Mr S S Bhagwat, OSD, mobile No 0-98201-05087 at N Ward Office, BMP, Ghatkopar, Mumbai) Sanitising of dalaos saves enormously on transport Costs. During a month-long experiment at Nehru Place, garbage was sprayed twice daily with compost- promoting bio-cultures and left uncleared. At the end, the stabilized odour-free garbage was carted away in just 6 trucks compared to the 30 required for daily clearance each month. Residents were happy with results. (Contact Anil Kakkar, Excel Industries Ltd, 2/3 West Patel Nagar 1st fl, Main Patel Rd, New Delhi 110008, tel 011-5817638, fax 5817637) Composting of Tihar Jail waste saved Rs 16 lacs in garbage clearance costs and earned Rs 8 lacs in sales. Suryapet in AP is a Zero-Waste City of 103,000 population. There is separate collection of wet and dry wastes. Wet waste is treated with bio-culture and stabilized, then vermicomposted. Dry waste is unloaded at the town’s own sorting shed and sold. Inert waste including drain silt and road dust is collected separately for use or separate disposal. Almost nothing remains for landfilling. Composting Is The Best Disposal Method For India : AEROBIC COMPOSTING in windrows, or accelerated by Microbial Bio – cultures for rapid odour-reduction, or Vermi-composting, recycles Wet Wastes into organic manures which provide humus, Micro – nutrients, and useful microbes for fields. ANAEROBIC digestion does not kill germs & pathogens. LANDFILLS consume scarce & costly land annually. Composting in open heaps or wind-rows can be speeded up by sprinkling the fresh garbage heaps in layers with water containing 5% FRESH COWDUNG and dusting on ~ 5 kg of Rock Phosphate per ton of garbage (This helps initially to feed the composting-microbes, which later yield this phosphorus to the crops). Heaps must be AT LEAST 4 ft high, to ensure that the temperature builds up very fast, to 70oC in 5-7 days, too hot to hold a hand inside the heap. Then it is time to turn the heap, placing the outer material in the centre of the new heap and the hot inner material on the outside of the new heap The high temperatures speed up the composting, kill weed seeds, & kill germs that cause diseases like cholera, typhoid, hepatitis, and worms. Compost is ready in 4 weeks with 3-4 turnings. Encourage private composting efforts by: Dry / Wet waste segregation at source. Free delivery of garbage to the composting spot Buy-back of off-season compost for city gardens Encourage banks to finance storage sheds for finished compost at the composters’ site SJSRY schemes can be devised for self-employment through collection of compostable waste and decentralised composting (as in Ludhiana). Composting is a pollution-abatement technology. In our fields, plants absorb only 20% of added Urea 80% is leached into soil, ground-water and wells : Punjab’s well – water has been ruined by nitrates. City compost acts like a sponge. It sucks up urea for later use by plants. Thus compost can act as a water - pollution - preventer. Plus, 1 bag urea used along with compost can deliver the results of 4-5 bags urea Coir-Pith Composting for Coconut-growing areas: Kuilapalyam village in T.N. uses coir pith to do very low - cost composting under shady trees. Villagers bring Pondicherry garbage @ Rs 20 per cart-load and pile it into big platforms: 20’x20’x4’ under the tamarind-trees near their village huts. They cover this with 6” of coir – pith purchased from Pondy @ Rs 50 per cart-load, and leave the heap undisturbed for several months until needed. The coir pith acts as an insulating blanket to keep in heat, moisture and any smell. It also keeps out flies and animals, hides the ugliness of heaps, and protects the compost from rain. At planting season, the coir pith and the rotted garbage below (now a compost) are collected together and applied in the fields. This makes the crop very drought-resistant as the coir-pith helps to retain water for long. ONLY SEGREGATED “WET WASTE” should be composted in this low-cost way since no sieving is done, and the city-compost along with the coir pith is used in the field as it is. Care must be taken to keep plastic bags out of compost heaps. Soil that contains plastic bags cannot absorb rain-water well. Seeds cannot germinate well. Plastics make the soil less fertile every year !! PLANNING INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CLEAN CITIES * The best way to keep streets clean is not to let them get dirty in the first place. * The best way to minimize dumping problems is to treat waste as wealth and recycle as much as possible. Done since Vedic times, it is now being forgotten. These solutions are spelt out in India’s latest national policy for handling garbage: The Ministry of Environment has issued, in September 2000, India’s first “Municipal Solid Waste (Management & Handling) Rules 2000” under our Environment Protection Act. It applies to all towns and cities over 20,000 population. Procuring a site as per MSW Rules is the single most important and immediate task for any city or town: “Schedule III : Site Selection 1, In areas falling under the jurisdiction of “Development Authorities”, it shall be the responsibility of such Development Authorities to identify the landfill sites and hand over the sites to the concerned municipal authority for development, operation and maintenance. Elsewhere, this responsibility shall lie with the concerned municipal authority.” “7. The landfill site shall be large enough to last for 20-25 years.” “9. A Buffer Zone of No-Development shall be maintained around landfill site and shall be incorporated in the Town Planning Department’s land-use plans.” “2. Selection of landfill sites shall be based on environmental issues . The State Urban Development Dept shall co-ordinate with the concerned organizations for obtaining the necessary approvals and clearances.” Such waste-processing and disposal sites may lie in or near former or existing villages, who will certainly not welcome the waste of others in their back-yard and will protest or take out a stay. it is very important to win their confidence. Villagers nearest to a waste processing or disposal facility should at the very outset be made members of a site-management committee, since they know the local conditions and solutions best and must have a forum for problem-solving. Based on “Polluter-Pays” principles, the villagers should receive some benefit from others’ waste being dumped near them. The municipalities / CMCs that use a site should pay for compost which can be supplied to the villages, perhaps one ton per year or season, per family or per acre of cultivated land nearby. This will not only ensure production of a quality product, it will also promote the marketing of compost which is such an important aspect of waste-processing operations. * Clean cities do not just happen. They must be planned for. 2, City managers need to provide, within each of its existing & future layouts, enough space for the following facilities: (a ) Enough space at each Ward Office or Block Office for secure parking of doorstep - waste - collection vehicles, repairs and supplies (b ) Earmarked space for dry-waste-sorting and collection by waste-pickers. Since this role is left to the informal sector, their collected dry wastes will surely spill over onto prime space like footpaths or vacant sites, causing civic conflict and hardship to the poor if designated spaces are not earmarked in advance for their activities. (e.g. Pimpri-Chinchwad has provided this under the corner of a flyover). (c ) Earmarked spaces (a little away from dense habitation zones) for decentralised composting, which is the most cost-effective way to minimise transport costs and manage segregated wet waste. (d ) Earmarked zones for waste-recycling industries, to encourage legitimate eco-friendly operations that can save a growing city from being buried in future pollution, 3, A city, and especially its Improvement Trust or Development Area, must provide adequate and suitable spaces in its areas for the planned management of special wastes: (a ) space in markets for garbage-take-away lorries or tractor-trailers to park, (b ) space for managing wastes from decentralised-slaughtering practices (c ) space for installing a common hospital-waste-processing site, (d ) spaces for cremating both humans and dead animals, (e ) space to dispose of inert wastes like debris, construction & demolition wastes, (f ) arrangements for transporting hotel / marriage-hall food wastes to pig-geries and veg-fruit-market wastes to cattle or sheep farms or to composting sites, (g ) space for collection and temporary drying of useful fuel-wastes like coconut-shells, sugarcane-juice-stall wastes, garden wastes (h ) Zoning space for relocating existing piggeries and cattle-sheds in their territory away from areas planned for new urbanisation, to prevent the mistakes of the past that most cities have to live with. This politically sensitive issue must be thoughtfully handled to accommodate the needs of all sections of society. 4, Zoning of hawking zones especially for street - food vendors, is absolutely vital for good waste-management in newly-formed urban areas. Develop[ment Authorities must not dodge this sensitive issue and pass the buck to future residents who will have uniformly NIMBY attitudes (“Not In My Back Yard”). 5, Zoning of high-density affordable housing is even more important, so that the working poor upon whom civic life depends can house themselves without creating new slums. Areas must be either designated or permitted where densities of 300 families per acre are allowed, in tiny row-house plots with minimal set-back and lanes just wide enough for three-wheelers. The poor need not be provided low-cost housing. They should merely be enabled to invest their own resources in their own low - cost progressively - upgraded homes, once land-tenure is assured on small sites with affordable building rules. Trunk infra - structure must reach these sites first: power, water, drainage (see 7 below) 6, Zoning of adequate housing for migrant labour engaged in construction of projects like ring roads, flyovers and bridges, as upto 50% this labour often stays back and its unplanned housing needs form the seeds of future slums. 7, Building bye-laws for group / apartment housing that mandate the recycling of buth silod and liquid wastes. Spaces must be provided for decentralised sewage-management. Otherwise cities will never be free of sewage in open storm-water drains even in new areas. 8, Development Authorities (DAs) must help strengthen the finances of their core cities and surroundings by prompt handing-over of their layouts to CMCs as soon as 50% occupancy is reached, so that the CMCs can start collecting property taxes etc from them. Presently Development Authorities hold on to these areas till their last few sites are sold, but meanwhile the burden of servicing DA colonies without any income from these layouts falls unfairly on the CMCs. 9, DAs must plan ahead for clean layouts. Their sale deeds must insist on citizen cooperation in dry-wet waste separation at the household and shop/market level. Sale deeds must require those purchasing ground-floor commercial spaces to take full responsibility for the day-and-night cleanliness of their respective frontages (upto the road centre, as at Chandigarh). 10, Finally, any Development Authority or Improvement Trust must take full ownership and responsibility for waste-management in an inhabited area under its own control from Day One, until the area is handed over to any other local body. Pune 6.3.2001 Almitra H Patel 50 Kothnur, Bagalur Rd, Bangalore 560077
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 08:19:12 +0000