The sustainability of India’s urbanisation will depend on the extent to which urban planning adopts ideas related to a circular economy. There is a need to look at replicable and high impact interventions in this area in order to ensure that urban growth does not outpace our ability to establish resilient systems to deal with the challenges that accompany it. The city of Indore rose to prominence in the 15th century as a trading hub situated between the Deccan and North India. It is therefore, not surprising that the city’s entrepreneurial ethos has now been brought to bear on the issues surrounding waste management in urban agglomerations. Indore has topped the charts of the Swaccha Survekshan Survey 5 years in a row. Now, it has added the largest Bio-CNG plant, or “GobarDhan Plant”, in the country to its list of innovative solutions to the problem of waste. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the plant in Indore in February this year. It has the capacity to process 550 tonnes per day of segregated wet organic waste. It is expected to produce around 17,000 kg per day of CNG, and 100 tonnes per day of organic compost. The Indore Municipal Corporation will purchase a minimum 50% of CNG produced by the plant and in a first-of-its kind initiative, run 400 city buses on the CNG, reducing emissions.
Despite these advantages, the GobarDhan Plant in Indore certainly benefitted from the robust waste segregation structures of the city, which has achieved 100% segregation of waste at source in its 84 wards. There are several other examples of Urban Local Bodies making strides in segregation, suggesting that there is more than one way to skin this cat. In 2010–11, Panaji, the oldest civic institution in Asia, implemented four-way segregation, an improvement over the earlier two-way segregation, and created collection points and recycling stations for non-biodegradable waste in the city. Training volunteers, mostly students, who visited individual households to demonstrate waste segregation and an extensive IEC campaign targeting households and commercial establishments hotels, the city was able to change practices related to waste disposal. Hotels, hospitals and nursing homes were provided with leaflets and pamphlets with segregation information at the source as well as garbage-lifting schedules. Green and black bins for segregation were sold at subsidised prices and in 2020–21 Panaji implemented segregation of waste into 16 fractions. Residential colonies in Panaji were encouraged to collect 16 types of waste in separate bins and through these practices the city was able to achieve 99% waste segregation at source.
Alapuzzha, dubbed the “Venice of the East”, had its own set of problems in managing waste. A decentralised approach to waste management and emphasis on source segregation was essential to ensure sustainable disposal of waste, as the densely populated city has an extensive network of canals thereby being vulnerable to clogging of water bodies due to dumping of waste and issues with running a centralised waste collection system. Before 2012, the municipal corporation dumped its waste in a six-hectare plot it owns in Sarvodayapuram, a village located in the nearby Mararikkulam panchayat. There were no centralised or decentralised waste treatment plants in the city. In 2012, following protests from citizens about the increased dumping of waste, the Nirmala Bhavanam Nirmala Nagaram (“Clean City Clean Home”) project was launched – first in 12 wards as a pilot and then extended to all 52 wards. The project was accompanied by a twin strategy of raising awareness about segregation through notices to the over 40,000 households in the area and implementing fines and penalties for violations. Further the city also launched a campaign to build biogas plants, pipe compost units in households and aerobic composting units in decentralised locations, to minimise costs associated with waste collection. As a result, the city has achieved 100% waste segregation at source, which has brought down the cost of garbage disposal and also allowed waste to be used as a source of revenue. It is important to note that one of the reasons for failure of the municipality’s experiment to establish a composting plant, was the lack of sufficient segregated waste. The experiences of Municipal bodies across India underline the importance of waste reduction, related to the vision of a “circular economy” and waste segregation at source in any strategy to streamline waste management systems.
Recognising this, the Government of India formed 11 committees for 11 focus areas “…to expedite the transition of the country from a linear to a circular economy.” Action on mainstreaming circularity in urban planning would broadly fall into three categories – ensuring proper disposal of waste, reducing waste and most importantly using waste to create value. It is in the last of these areas that waste-to-energy projects offer an opportunity that can be leveraged not only to establish Clean Cities, but also to cater to ensure that the growing energy needs of these cities are catered to. While the sheer pace of urban transition in India means there are vulnerabilities in terms of both spatial (land use, transport, logistics, environment etc.) and non-spatial (administrative and legislative structures, budget allocations etc.) aspects of urban planning, the diversity of urban settlements resulting from this rapid change needs to be taken into account specifically in the context of exploring waste-to-energy projects. The emergence of census towns and “outgrowths” present a unique opportunity to bring such projects to settlements, pre-empting waste and energy problems in these areas and addressing the obstacles in establishing greenfield waste-energy-projects.
The breakneck speed of Urbanisation in India has left urban spaces vulnerable to unplanned and unregulated growth. As per the 2011 census the urban system of India consists of 7933 settlements, including 4041 statutory and 3892 census towns. Census towns have a minimum population of 5,000, at least 75% of the male ‘main workers’ engaged in non-agriculture and allied activities, and a density of population of at least 400 persons per sq. km.
They do not necessarily have urban local bodies. This does not include “viable units, such as a village, clearly identifiable in terms of their boundaries and locations” with urban features that are “physically contiguous with the core town of the urban agglomeration” (The latter are termed as “Outgrowths”). Census towns and outgrowths together comprise over 15% of the 377.1 million urban population of India. Due to the importance of these settlements to urbanisation in India, the Ministry of Urban Development asked states in 2018 to convert 3784 census towns to urban local bodies to promote planned urban development. The census towns are also exhibiting a much faster rate of population growth than the big urban centres. This may lead to gaps in urban planning, particularly waste management, in two respects. First, the census towns would not have structures in place to deal with the exponential growth in waste generation that is likely to accompany rising populations. Waste management mechanisms need to anticipate the transition these areas are growing through, including capacity to enforce regulations. Second, behavioural practices, including those related to waste such as waste segregation and disposal, tend to take a long time to change, and are unlikely to adapt to the growth of these settlements in time. Awareness campaigns and public outreach will have to be undertaken targeting all stakeholders, such as residents, local representatives and municipal officials. In order to address these two problems, planners need to be focussed on anticipating the waste generation potential of these settlements and design policies and interventions to address problems of the present as well as the future.
Waste-to-energy projects offer a path towards sustainable disposal of waste and creation of Garbage Free Cities. Even if a smaller capacity plant is established in semi-urban areas, the benefits would be immediate. Bio-methanation plants would provide a means of generating electricity from organic waste, albeit on a small scale. Bio-CNG plants offer the additional advantage that they produce ready to use environment friendly fuel, which decreases dependence on petrol and diesel. Both these plants also produce organic compost, which can be channelled back to local rural communities engaged in agriculture. This makes the census towns and outgrowths ideal locations for establishment of such waste-to-energy projects, provided enough waste can be generated on a daily basis to sustain such a plant and waste is segregated at source. Locating plants amidst a cluster of census towns and outgrowths in proximity to major urban conglomerates or multiple agricultural mandis would address several issues. Higher organic waste in these areas will provide enough volume if the plant is located at a junction between settlements. The Swaccha Bharat Mission – Urban 2.0 Guidelines issued in October 2021 also favour this approach saying, “Cluster of ULBs can also be considered for creation of common infrastructure, keeping in mind the techno-commercial viability. For ULBs with population of more than 3 lakh (including ULB clusters), it is recommended that the wet waste will be processed using Biomethanation, to produce biogas/bioCNG for higher economic returns.”
Further, it would do away with the problem of transportation of a major proportion of waste, which would be used locally, similar to the decentralised waste management of Alapuzzha. The plant would also generate local employment, absorbing the settlers moving away from agriculture. Availability of Bio-CNG would address the future energy needs of the region, without increasing consumption of fossil fuels. Finally, Bio-CNG plants can also be dovetailed with other projects such as urban transportation, following the example of Indore.
However, there are certain factors which need to be kept in mind while planning waste-to-energy projects in census town & outgrowth clusters. Waste segregation needs to be addressed for waste-to-energy projects to be successful in census town and outgrowth clusters. Waste segregation at source is essential for any such projects to be successful and would have to be ingrained in the day-to-day practices of the community. IEC and behaviour change campaigns would have to be undertaken to raise awareness about segregation and disposal amongst the people. Since most of the communities still dependent on agriculture would be using organic waste generated for composting and as manure, projects should also aim to incentivise them to redirect such waste to these plants. In order to cut down costs of transportation of waste, collection centres would have to be established either through intervention of the local government body or through community action. This would allow the private player to collect waste from identified centres and build a reliable supply chain of organic waste in the region. Finally, the capital cost of the project needs to be considered. With most local government bodies and state governments facing constrained budgets due to the COVID-19 pandemic, projects with a lower capital outlay are preferable to large scale interventions. As far as possible the capital expenditure should be financed through CSR contributions, Central government subsidies or international soft loans declared for the renewable energy or waste-to-energy projects.
Keeping these concerns in mind, such projects offer an easy solution to several issues that growing urban settlements are likely to face during their life cycle from semi urban or rural areas to full-fledged urban agglomerations. A decentralised cluster-based waste-to-energy model focussing on census towns and outgrowths presents a platform to involve the community as a stakeholder in the establishment of the project, linking benefits to waste management practices. It is through such engagement that circular economic practices can be mainstreamed into community lifestyles and become the basis of sustainable urban transition.
