 "How Indore manages to top India's cleanest city list year after year")
Indore has yet again topped the list of India’s cleanest city. This is the seventh straight time that the commercial capital of Madhya Pradesh has taken this honour. The prize was given to Indore by President Droupadi Murmu in New Delhi. But how does Indore manage to remain top of the list every year? Let’s take a closer look: The cleanliness survey First, let’s briefly examine the cleanliness survey.
The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs launched the Swachh Survekshan in 2016.
Citizen feedback and field assessment are the two main criteria to assess cleanliness. Cities must enter updated data on the Centre’s Swachh Bharat Mission Management Information System (MIS). The areas being evaluated will be “validated through Citizen Validation conducted in Residential and Commercial Areas in each ward on sampling basis.” Citizens are then asked questions about waste collection – which is then validated by assessors visit places at random. The criteria evaluated are the type of technical support given to sanitation workers, if ID cards are issued to informal waste pickers and if PPE kits are distributed. In 2016, Indore was ranked at number 25, as per Indian Express. Indore rises up the ranks As per The Print, it was then municipal commissioner Manish Singh who took the initiative. Singh said he began by focusing on in-house sanitation infrastructure. “We built our fleet of door-to-door garbage collection vehicles. We strengthened the municipal workshop, where old vehicles go for repair,” Singh told the outlet. “We beefed up our team of safai karamcharis and built their capacity.”
As per The Print, the IMC was soon carrying out 100 per cent door-to-door collection of garbage.
Indian Express in 2017 quoted then IMC deputy commissioner Santosh Tagore as saying they altered routes of garbage trucks so that they directly picked up segragated waste from homes. NGOs were also brought into the fold and participated in awareness campaigns. [caption id=“attachment_13603972” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs launched the Swachh Survekshan in 2016.[/caption] Some workers even refused to take unsegregated waste. As per Indian Express, the efforts were initially looked upon unfavourably by the local ragpickers. However, after installing 3,000 dustbins every 500 metres for 2.3 crore, the IMC brought in 1,000 garbage collectors and most ragpickers into its workforce of 8,000 ‘Safai Mitras’. The IMC next year focused on “reduce, reuse and recycle”, while fourth year was dedicated tohome composting, as per The Print. By 2019, the IMC asked the public to shut any sewer connection leading into rivers or water bodies. “Our goal was that we won’t let our water bodies get dirty… We have cleaned the surface, this time, we will keep our water bodies clean,” then municipal commissioner Pratibha Pal told the outlet. The city also tackled the issue of waste that had been untreated for several years, as per Indian Express. The city cleared and processed almost 13 lakh metric tonnes of waste at the Devguradiya ground in under six months. “For a five-star rating in Swachh Bharat, one of the criteria is that 75 per cent of the waste be treated at the dumping site,” Asheesh Singh, Indore’s then municipal commissioner, told Indian Express in 2019. ‘Mindset has changed’ As per The Print, citizens taking matter into their own hands over the years when it comes to keeping the city clean has also helped. A senior Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) official told the outlet a municipal sweeper halted an auto after witnessing a wrapper being thrown by a passenger.
The sweeper then made the passenger pick up the wrapper.
“People’s mindset has changed. They themselves come forward to flag or protest if they see garbage strewn around or someone littering in public,” Pal told the outlet in 2021. Mahesh Sharma, cleanliness wing superintendent engineer of the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC), in 2022 told Outlook the IMC has 850 vehicles to collect waste. The waste in then separated into six categories – wet, electronics, plastics, non-plastic, biomedical, and hazardous. The vehicles even have different compartments to store different kinds waste. Discarded sanitary napkins, for example, go into a separate waste compartment. ‘The 3R strategy’ This year’s compteition witnessed fierce competition in different categories between more than 4,400 cities. The survey carried a total of 9,500 marks. MP’s Indore city secured 4,709.40 marks out of 4,830 under ‘Service Level Progress’ for segregated collection, processing and disposal of different types of waste, Indore Municipal Corporation’s (IMC) consultant for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Amit Dubey, told PTI. “A sustainable system of garbage collection, processing and disposal has been developed in Indore. The city’s consecutive success in the National Cleanliness Survey is based on this strong foundation,” he said.
With a complete ban on single-use plastic in Indore, waste generation has reduced here over a period of time, Dubey said.
The ‘3 R’ (reduce, reuse and recycle) centres, cloth bags and utensil ‘banks’, parks developed using reusable things out of waste materials and home composting units have also helped in the reduction of waste in the city, he said. The waste from 4.65 lakh households and 70,543 commercial establishments is systematically sorted at the primary source and processed and disposed of at different plants in the city, IMC officials said. [caption id=“attachment_13603982” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Civic officials also chalk up the success to a change in people’s mindset. PTI[/caption] Nearly 692 tonnes of wet waste, 683 tonnes of dry garbage and 179 tonnes of plastic trash are collected every day in the city under different categories, they pointed out. For this, around 850 specially-designed vehicles are run across the city having different compartments for bio-waste items like diapers and sanitary napkins. The waste from households in the city is collected after segregation under six categories at the doorsteps. A ‘Gobar-Dhan’ plant is being run by a company under public-private partnership (PPP) on 15 acres of land at Devguradiya trenching ground in the city. It has the capacity to produce 17,000 to 18,000 kg of bio-CNG and 100 tonnes of organic fertilisers by processing 550 tonnes of wet waste (like fruits, vegetables and raw meat waste) every day, officials said. As per The Quint, the plant was built at a cost of Rs 150 crore. It was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in February 2022. The bio-CNG produced at this plant is used to run 110 city buses, with the fuel being sold to the municipal corporation for Rs 5 per kilogram less than the prevailing market rate, they said.
The civic body in the 2021 fiscal year raised Rs 14.45 crore from waste disposal.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThat included Rs 8.5 crore from the sale of carbon credits in the international market and another Rs 2.52 crore as an annual premium from a private company for providing waste to the bio-CNG plant. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Mohan Yadav congratulated the people of Indore for the top cleanliness ranking. President Droupadi Murmu gave away the awards to the winners at a function held in New Delhi. At the function, Yadav received the award for the cleanest city. Madhya Pradesh urban administration minister Kailash Vijayvargiya and Indore civic chief Harshika Singh were present on the occasion. Hailing the feat, Chief Minister Yadav said the people of Indore have proved that cleanliness is not only their habit, but also an integral part of their thought process. Yadav congratulated conservancy workers over the ranking and urged them to keep up the good work. Many sanitation workers were seen celebrating the achievement by beating drums and distributing sweets. Dedicating the victory to Lord Ram, Indore Mayor Pushyamitra Bhargava said the city had become a model not only for India, but also the world with regard to cleanliness. With inputs from agencies
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