An Unwasted Opportunity: OYE! AMBALA
My role as CMGGA Ambala began with the struggles the district was facing around waste management. The city was ranked 308 out of 414 cities in SwachhSarvekshan 2017 which indeed indicated a scope for improvement. On the one hand, was a commonly held belief that Municipal Corporations do not work, on the other hand, I witnessed the commitment of the Municipal Commissioner to change the face of the city.
OYE! Ambala was launched on July 13th, 2017 by the Municipal Corporation of Ambala, and I jumped on board to support it. The objective of the campaign was to achieve 30% waste segregation at source in 60 days and to follow the Municipal Solid Waste Rules 2016, in letter and spirit. The launch itself was a tough job, given the anger of the citizens, which they already expressed, about the shortcomings of the Municipal Corporation. Addressing the citizens’ concerns, the Municipal Corporation announced at the launch, “Ambala will not become Paris in 60 days, but it will certainly have its own recognition in cleanliness”.
Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) refers to a systematic process that comprises of waste segregation and storage at source, primary collection, secondary storage, transportation, secondary segregation, resource recovery, processing, treatment, and final disposal of solid waste. OYE! Ambala started with an extensive survey of all the 20 wards of Ambala City and Ambala Cantonment. The objective of the survey was to understand the root of the problem — why couldn’t the city manage its waste? Volunteers went door to door to find out what happens to household waste, who collects it and how frequently. In parallel, each and every dumping site (assigned and non-assigned) was mapped. This was a crucial phase, especially when country-wide discussions about the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan criticized Municipal Corporations for contracting safai karmcharis as a means of avoiding their responsibility of providing them with protective gear. While regularization of waste collection is an important step, change needed to begin from the effective implementation of the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016.
The next step was to put an effective Information, Education and Communication (IEC) campaign in place to mobilize people. It started with training safai karmcharis and the sanitation team of the Municipal Corporation, Ambala. This training helped create widespread awareness about sanitation within the municipal limits. The sanitation team, along with volunteers, went door-to-door visiting households, commercial establishments, hospitals, educational institutions and banquets to instil the idea of waste segregation at source. Community leaders were identified, and through them many rounds of workshops were conducted to help spread the practice of waste segregation at source. Over time, the citizens of Ambala extended their full support to the Corporation.
Meanwhile, a lot was being done in the background. A team, comprising the leaders of the sanitary team, a contractor (responsible for waste collection), and expert IEC consultants from ReCity, was set up under the chairmanship of Municipal Commissioner. The team’s goal was to ensure active and frequent problem solving efforts in waste management. Wards were chosen in phases, and the work began with waste collection. Though the routes were identified, waste collection was irregular due to various reasons. Due to infrastructural insufficiencies, waste workers were not able to reach every household. Their hand-pulled carts were full with the garbage of only 40–50 households. That is when, during a team brainstorm, it was decided to mechanise waste collection through e-rickshaws, motorised carts and trolleys. Low cost solutions like fixing a wooden/metal blocks in carts and rickshaws were used to compartmentalise it into dry, wet and harmful waste. Small steps towards making their work easier enabled them to ensure waste segregation at source.
Over time, the brainstorming meetings helped to bridge the coordination among team members. The result was seen in the field. In a matter of around 40 days, waste segregation at source was achieved in four wards, which were chosen as a pilot. The positive results in the four wards, pushed us to scale it across all 20 wards of the Municipal Corporation. Within four months, 80% waste segregation at source was achieved across each ward in Ambala. The experience of OYE! Ambala has helped me extract many insights and learning in the field of waste management.
● Urban areas do not only consist of households. A sustainable waste management project cannot succeed unless specialised strategies are devised for each sector — households, commercial units, educational institutions, hospitals, religious precincts and so on.
● While the end goal of any cleanliness mission is widely known, it is very important to break down the steps involved to achieving the goals, especially for the benefit of the Municipal Corporations’ employees. It requires immense hand-holding.
● It is time for municipalities to start focusing on infrastructural upgrades for better productivity of waste workers. This infrastructure may range from having a motorised waste collection cart to digitalising the entire monitoring system.
● Having a decentralised approach towards waste treatment may prove to be more practical than a centralised/clustered approach, and also cost effective.
The narrative around waste management in Ambala, moved beyond the limited discussion of having a solid waste treatment plant. The effort to ensure waste segregation at source helped us solve many subsets of waste management problems. For example, unless door to door waste collectors don’t collect waste every day, people will end up disposing mixed waste on roads. A number of karmcharis were suffering from skin infections which pushed us to closely monitor if they had been given protective gear and usage of the same. Similarly, we noted that a city cannot be cleaner till the absence of decentralised transfer stations for the collected waste. The reason being the need to have a place to accumulate all the collected waste at a station so that it goes to the landfill in one go. It led to planning and construction of transfer stations for both Ambala City and Ambala Cantonment. The OYE! Ambala campaign also involved night sweeping, constructing collection centres, upgrading infrastructure and using a mobile application, which enabled easy feedback by citizens to ensure better sanitation. Blaming one another in the brainstorming meetings has today bloomed into appreciating and helping each other. The development of this project always reminds me of the first conversation I had with Municipal Commissioner, Ambala: “Every problem can be solved, we need to take the ownership to be able to solve it.”
