The Mumbai lesson: What Modi govt should know before fining people for littering

Taking the Prime Minister’s pet Swacch Bharat initiative to a whole new level, the central government is reportedly planning to introduce an amendment to the existing Environment Protection Act during the monsoon session of Parliament with fines being levelled against litterbugs to deter them.

The Indian Express in a report said that the ministry of environment and forest plans to make littering in public places a minor offence and is planning to levy a minor fine on the spot for anyone caught defacing public places or throwing waste in the open.

The announcement comes days after Union minister of Environment Prakash Javadekar reportedly said that his ministry had finalised proposals to amend the Environment Protection Act, 1986 and submitted them to the cabinet for approval.

But the central government’s plan is something that isn’t entirely original and past experiences show the problem with implementing such a scheme. Financial capital Mumbai, had in the past tried something similar had tried to keep the city streets clean but achieved mixed results.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in 2007 had introduced a clean-up Mumbai campaign and had appointed ‘clean-up marshals’  from private agencies at different spots in the city. They were stationed in the 24 wards of the civic body and were empowered to levy fines ranging from Rs 100 to Rs 20,000 and the fines collected was to be divided between the private contractor and BMC, as this IBN-Live report said .

But the scheme came under a lot of flak over its implementation. Soon, complaints started pouring in against the ‘clean-up marshals.’

Public and civic corporators complained of high-handedness of the marshals and a lack of credibility  given some of them would be in plain clothes and most often not carry any identification card. Allegations of corruption were also levelled against the marshals.

According to The Indian Express report, the BMC in earned around Rs 11 crore in four years from the programme. The programme was scrapped in 2012, but was later revived in 2013 with only security agencies with ex-servicemen to be appointed and a tweaking of the rules.

Civic officials said that this time around BMC had instructed the clean-up marshals to focus on cleanliness and not on fining the erring public.

“The main purpose of this project is not collecting fine but ensuring the cleanliness of the city. The duty of the marshals is to make the citizens responsible for their attitude towards cleanliness, without being loud or arrogant. Their behaviour is of prime importance,” an official responsible for training the marshals was quoted as saying in a an  Indian Express report .

But the revamped scheme also flopped after city residents complained of high-handedness and  corruption again. A panel was created to look into the smooth functioning of the systems said that even after it was revived for the second time, corporators had complained about the behaviour of clean-up marshals, The Times of India reported.

The BMC then decided to fall back on appointing civic employees as ’nuisance detectors’ so that their focus wouldn’t be on increasing the amount of fine collected.

But with the clean-up marshal scheme non-existent and very few ’nuisance detectors’ at its disposal, the civic body is struggling to achieve positive results. A recent report in The Asian Age said that the BMC is planning to revive the controversial clean up marshal scheme again.

It remains to be seen whether the central government has studied the Mumbai scheme and the reason for its failures. It’s own plans of introducing fines for those who litter could well run into the same roadblocks as the Mumbai plan and it would do well to prepare for them.