Three years of Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan has seen impressive progress being made on account of making cleanliness a national mainstream subject. However, given the population pressures, it’s time for to move to the next stage by making waste segregation and recycling a part of daily life
Exactly three years ago, on October 2, 2015, the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi also marked the beginning of the most ambitious national programme on cleanliness — the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan (SBA). The scale and detail of the initiative easily dwarfed any previous such project launched in post-independent era.
The three years have seen impressive progress being logged on account of making cleanliness a national mainstream subject. Probably the best output scored by Swachh Bharat was the tremendous increase in awareness levels of the common man on matters pertaining to cleanliness and sanitation. The mission aims to achieve clean India objective by October 2, 2019.
In the last three years, Swachh Bharat focused on constructing individual toilets and community toilets, besides enabling solid waste management. While the first two years of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan went into setting up the necessary regulatory and policy changes to facilitate the scientific processing of waste, in the third year, the programme shifted its focus on bringing about behaviour change among citizens in order to inculcate a sense of cleanliness.
The Swachh Bharat encouraged city municipalities and citizen bodies to be a part of this initiative through various schemes and campaigns such as Swachhata Hi Seva, Segregation at Source campaign, City Compost Policy, Swachhata Pakhwada and Swachhagrahi. But inspite of the excitement generated and actions taken, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan initiative seems to be losing steam as it struggles to rise above the usual definitions of cleanliness and hygiene signified by broomsticks and photo ops by luminaries of the society and polity.
Three years is a long time but the serious phase of Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, consisting of in-depth waste segregation processing and recycling, is yet to begin on a mass scale. This is made more difficult by the lack of systems and infrastructure that can support high volume waste segregation that works in tandem with recycling concepts. This is the critical need of the hour as this can enable the transition of this initiative to the next stage.
The slow progress of Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan in the arena of waste segregation and recycling is partly due to the manpower related problems. In the last three years, sanitation workers have refused to collect waste door-to-door and have gone on strikes on issues related to non-payment of salaries and contractor-related concerns in many cities, such as Delhi, Chandigarh and Bengaluru. Also, in many cities, the door-to-door collection has failed to integrate the informal sector. This has seriously compromised the progress of Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan and given a set back to the initiative.
Waste-processing front has been a challenge for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan. In cities like Chandigarh, waste processing has come to a grinding halt due to ongoing public interest litigation against the local waste management plant. Similarly, no processing system has been put in place for management of waste in Jharkhand, Daman & Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli.
Additionally, in 11 States of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab, Maharashtra, Mizoram, Odisha, Uttarakhand and West Bengal, less than 10 per cent of the waste is currently being processed. This state of affairs is becoming a major hurdle for the progress of Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan.
As the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan struggles to overcome these problems, the levying of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on recycling and composting is proving to be the proverbial final nail in the coffin for the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan effort.
Simply put, increased tax slabs for recyclables is killing the recycling sector. Composting machines are attracting 12 per cent tax against the eight per cent previously. While on one hand the Government is trying to promote city compost, imposing five per cent GST will have a negative impact on its production and promotion. Given these obstacles, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan will find moving ahead even tougher unless the Government takes urgent remedial measures and restores confidence in the recycling sector.
The Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan has provided the much-needed impetus to the solid waste management sector, but unless the Government consciously puts in place regulations that are respected and followed incidents such as the Ghazipur landfill accident and Deonar Mumbai incident will occur again. Aim must be to create sustainable practices in solid waste management that will not only establish regulated environment but would also help facilitate creation of systems that can support segregation at source, sustainable processing and minimised use of land for waste disposal. Given the population pressures and volume of waste being generated today, it is time for Swachh Bharat to evolve to the next stage by making waste segregation and recycling a part of daily life.
(The writer is an environmental journalist)