Public-community participation in household waste management in India: An operational approach
Introduction
Households' solid waste management in the cities of developing countries is yet to be recognized as a well organized programme and India, being a developing country, is no exception to that observation. Traditional methods with marginal inputs of modern concepts appear to be the common practice (Bhide & Sundaresan 1984). Waste management is also gradually becoming expensive and complex due to rapid urbanization. ‘Considered as a problem of urban planning and public health issue, solid waste management (SWM) in Indian cities falls under the responsibility of municipal authorities, who carry out this task in 98% of cities in India’ (Papageorgiou, 2006; 104). On the other hand, the generators of waste do not bear the social cost of their action as the authorities traditionally collect municipal taxes for providing municipal services. These taxes are on a flat rate basis in the sense that these have no relation to the volume of waste generated by those paying the tax, implying zero marginal cost of waste generation. The resulting effect is unlimited generation of waste leading to the difficulties in providing the desired level of public service through municipalities for this gradually increasing burden put on them.
Inefficient and highly labour-intensive collection techniques are a significant feature of the improper solid waste management system in developing countries (Cointreau-Levine, 1994). The capital-intensive modern techniques, which increase the efficiency in collection and disposal (Beede & Bloom, 1995), are beyond the capacity of the municipal authorities. Experiences from the Indian cities provide evidence of this (e.g. Muller et al., 2002, Nath, 1984, Sehker and Von Beukering, 1998, Shekdar et al., 1992, Sudhir et al., 1996). In addition, there is inefficiency in delivering solid waste management (SWM) services by the public sector in the Indian sub-continent due to the expenditure burden and political influence.
Given the general decline in the provision of public services, new approaches are being devised with a view to increasingly realigning the responsibilities between public sector, private sector and civil society. In doing so, municipalities have to analyze all available choices for service delivery. An integrated approach to deliver urban services is increasingly being proposed as a possible solution to the waste management problem (Ahmed and Ali, 2004, Ali et al., 1999, Baud and Post, 2001, Rakodi, 1999).
In this context, the notion of community participation along with waste management authority in the field of SWM is one of the most frequently suggested methods along with its merits and problems (see, e.g. Joseph, 2006, Papageorigious, 2006, Zia and Devadas, 2007 and the references therein). In India up to the present, private sector involvement with community participation is very limited and is only concentrated at the secondary collection level (Papageorgiou, 2006). Sustainability of this participation after the completion of a project cannot be ensured. Financial, as well as operational, sustainability are the criteria that one requires to ensure for the success of the system. Therefore, with these constraints, such a system may work as long as the size of operation is small and the property rights (i.e., roles, responsibilities and incentives) are clearly defined. With the increase in the size of the system, the role of the government, or municipal authorities, become important.
The volume of waste generated in the metropolitan cities like Kolkata in India is significantly large. Apart from collection of wastes and street sweeping, final disposal also becomes an unmanageable job. Simple dumping of waste on specifically earmarked disposal grounds is followed by almost all municipal authorities in India. Land for landfilling has been acquired years ago and the sites are over-used. Acquisition of new sites is becoming increasingly difficult owing to scarcity of land for rapid urbanization. Therefore, an efficient SWM system in the context of waste management in Indian cities has to take into account the basic constraints such as (i) limitation in the availability of land and (ii) shortage of resources.
The introduction of an efficient SWM system imposes additional cost to the authorities. In the absence of adequate supply of physical and financial resources by the government, involvement of stakeholders, like the private business sector, informal sector (e.g. rag pickers), waste traders, NGOs, etc. and civil society along with the public authority, is required. The involvement is in terms of bearing the cost of waste management at every stage beginning from the primary collection to ultimate disposal. However, as SWM is a basic service, profit cannot be a main motive and participation of public/government agencies is necessary for SWM service with public health and public good dimension. On the other hand, sustainability of the system may not be ensured without providing any incentives (rewards/subsidy) to the private sectors (having profit earning motivation) for rendering those services.
This paper tries to explore the possibilities of applicability of this arrangement in making an effective SWM policy for a municipality with considerable size. Baranagar Municipal (BM) area, adjacent to Kolkata Corporation area, has been chosen as the study area in this context. BM deals with a large volume of waste and is characterized by all such SWM problems with a different climatic situation, waste type and socio-economic conditions compared to other metropolitan cities.
The plan of the paper is as follows: This ‘introduction’ is followed in Section 2 by the discussion of the area where a survey has been conducted to collect the data used in the study. Section 3 describes the methodology used in the study. Section 4 presents the results of the data analysis. The final section, Section 5, presents the summary and concluding remarks.
Section snippets
Survey area and data
BM is located in the north-western part of the city of Kolkata covering 7.12 km2 with population size 250,678 with 2.5% annual growth rate (Census of India, 2001). It was originally a very old settlement area consisting of residential, commercial, industrial (large and small industries) and trading activities. As a result of recent rapid urbanization there has been an expansion of residential areas leaving increasingly less open space for other purposes.
A sample survey was conducted in 2003
Methodology
In the proposed integrated/jointly managed system, private agencies may be involved in primary garbage collection, sorting of waste by component, selling/processing of recyclable materials and finally disposal of non-usable materials. However, their involvement in rendering the waste management services at multiple stages depends on the net return from the investment on this service in terms of incentives and cooperation from the authority. The authority may provide cooperation by (a)
Household's decision to segregate the wastes by components
Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics of the variables used in the analysis. The contingency coefficients depicted in Table 2 show that the degree of association of the decision to segregate the waste by components at the household level (WTSEP) with three factors: (a) the lack of provision of door-to-door waste collection services provided to the household by the municipality (HGBD), (b) households' knowledge about BM's problem in this regard (BMPRB) and (c) recycling/reuse habit of the
Summary of observations and concluding remarks
Public-community participation in the field of households' solid waste management by municipalities is one of the most frequently suggested methods to be pursued in SWM in developing countries. However, this has so far been introduced in some of the Indian cities on a project basis covering only a part of a total municipal area, but sustainability of the system could not be ensured to the present even after completion of the projects. Given the situation, to cope with the general decline in the
Acknowledgement
We are grateful to Professors D. Coondoo and P. Maiti for suggesting the theme and being involved in the study beginning from the survey design to preparation of the paper. We would like to sincerely thank the anonymous referee for the valuable comments on the paper.
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