Waste sorting at home a weak link in Swachh Bharat

Ten years after the Central government introduced the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) on October 2, 2014 as a flagship initiative to improve India’s solid waste management, a lack of segregation at source remains a major hindrance in realising the environmental and economic benefits of the mission, experts have said.
In India, segregation at source was first introduced as a mandate as part of the Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules, first notified by the ministry of environment, forests and climate change (MoEF&CC) in the year 2000, later in 2016, and subsequently in the SBM 2.0 guidelines in 2021.
Sanitation being a state subject, the onus of implementation was on states and was eventually carried out by municipalities and other local bodies.
However, the national capital continues to fare poorly on almost all waste management parameters — slow remediation of landfill sites, cleanliness of residential and market areas, as well as poor door-to-door waste collection.
The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), the civic body for around 94% of the Capital’s geographical area, claims to have achieved 100% door-to-door waste collection and 55% waste segregation at source, but these numbers have been questioned by RWAs, experts and in some instances the mayor herself. During a Supreme Court hearing in July, it was revealed that 3,000 tonnes of unprocessed waste is daily dumped in Delhi, of the 11,000 tonnes of waste generated.
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The story is not rosy in other big cities either — Mumbai has a source segregation of 65%, with 49% of the waste processed, while in Bengaluru, 99% of the waste is segregated but only 81% is processed.
Sectoral experts said despite reporting a high rate of segregation of waste, only a few cities have a robust system of sorting trash at source, or at the household-level itself. Thus, largely, solid waste is manually segregated by waste collectors at large centralised waste processing centres without following standard quality checks or worse mixed waste is dumped in mounting landfills, which makes regular headlines over public health risks.
According to experts, the presence of mixed waste leads to undesirable outcomes such as waste-to-energy (WtE) plants running inefficiently and needing more fuel to incinerate waste, leading to both environmental and financial losses. More than 10 WtE plants across India have shut down due to economic infeasibility despite government subsidies since 1987, according to a study by Down to Earth. The ones that are running often are fined by pollution control boards or pulled up by courts over environmental concerns, they said.
Further improperly segregated organic waste produces methane during composting—a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon oxides–just as unprocessed waste. Mixing plastics, glass, and synthetics in organic waste also produces compost that leads to poor soil health by stopping water percolation, gas exchange, and overall longer decomposition times. Worse, heavy metal contamination can lead to reduced crop growth and poses a threat to food safety.
A study of compost samples from Delhi, Ahmedabad and Bengaluru by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in 2023, showed that compost from various sites in Delhi and Ahmedabad contains high levels of pathogenic bacteria, heavy metal suggesting the need for better quality control.
Swati Singh Sambyal, an independent waste management expert, said wherever segregation at source has been successful it has been due to deep engagement between municipality and citizens involving community organisations, non-government actors and focus on de-centralised waste management processing centres. But most metropolitans have models which are heavily reliant on centralised systems with dependence on treatment systems that often utilise mixed waste and are at the bottom of the waste hierarchy pyramid, she said.
For instance, in Delhi, about 7200 tonnes of waste gets processed majorly via incineration-intensive technologies while the remaining is dumped in landfills. “This means a lot of money is spent on capital intensive treatment systems that have huge processing costs, this could otherwise be spent on setting up decentralised centres with focus on material recovery and processing (composting, biogas, recycling) and minimising waste disposal.” The need of the hour is to ensure segregation is mandatory, not optional in out cities and to further establish robust systems that support end to end segregation with focus on inclusion of all stakeholders in the waste value chain, she further added.
Need for decentralisation
A 2021 NITI Aayog study on Surat found that while the city’s civic body had set aside ₹11 crore per annum for the collection and transportation of municipal solid waste, only ₹3.29 crore was spent on processing.
In contrast, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) tied up with SWACH — a cooperative of waste pickers, which collects segregated waste from close to a million households (70% of the city) and recycles 79,697 tonnes annually. The waste is processed through more than 50 processing facilities, including 25 decentralised biogas plants and 14 biodigesters. This system, experts said, significantly reduces transportation costs by treating waste locally, increases accountability and minimises risk of waste accumulation.
Mysuru too operates several decentralised composting units, along with one centralised unit to process mixed and waste that cannot be processed locally. Similar examples have come up in cities such as Panaji (Goa), Alleppey (Kerala), and Ambikapur in Chhattisgarh.
Roopa Mishra, mission director of SBM(U) and joint secretary at ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) said, “With SBM funds, many cities have been able to set up various infrastructure– be it waste processing centre, biogas plants and MRFs which are important parts of the waste value chain.” She explained viability of these projects are dependent on the quality of segregation which encourages cities to focus on source segregation and the quality of inputs. Currently, she said 118 such biogas plants of various capacities are under works. In addition, she said the survekshan rankings consider segregation as one of the metric.
She explained in order for these projects to be viable for the private players, source segregation and quality of segregation is crucial, which indirectly nudges cities.
Atin Biswas, programme director of solid waste management at Centre for Science and Environment, said cities are highly incapacitated and heavily dependent on private contractors for solidc waste management.
“Often processes start but due to lack of continuity in leadership, they don’t translate into long-term success,” he said. “Many municipalities do not have an internal mechanism to monitor the quantity or quality of waste processing. Assessments are done by short-term contractual staff who may not be adequately trained.”
Biswas said state governments can direct urban local bodies to have proper internal monitoring mechanisms. “Unless this is sorted, we cannot graduate from only talking about visual cleanliness to having an ecosystem where we can talk about generating wealth from waste,” he said.
To fine or not to fine
The solid waste management rules notified in 2016 suggest that cities should impose strict penalties for households that do not comply with segregation rules. But even when cities initiated segregated waste collection, they have been largely unenthusiastic and inconsistent at best with these fines fearing public backlash.
Indore, which ranked as the cleanest city in the SBM awards for seven consecutive years, has a highly effective fining mechanism, with even officials at the sanitation inspector-level authorised to issue spot fines. Further, property tax rebates were also introduced for segregating wastes to incentivise adherence to the rules.
Syad Javed Ali Warsi, a consultant with the Indore Municipal Corporation and former advisor to SBM, said to change the behaviour of citizens, the city authority heavily invested in behavioural change, information, and communication campaigns even at a door-to-door level. These sustained campaigns in Indore led to more than 2,500 households adopting home-composting which reduced the waste management burden for the city.
An MCD official said that the civic body discussed levying penalties against Delhi residents over lack of waste segregation and for “user charges”, but the idea has repeatedly faced stiff political resistance. “Even if warning notices are issued in certain localities, we face resistance from residents as well as local politicians. We are instead working on ‘zero waste colonies’ concept by providing tax incentives to colonies that segregate waste,” the official said.
Bharati Chaturvedi, environmentalist and founder of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group said that one of the problems being faced by the people segregating waste is lack of space and material recovery facilities (MRF). “Even in upscale colonies such as Vasant Vihar in Delhi, where segregation is happening and a lot of waste is generated, there is not enough space or a dedicated MRF. The problem is lack of space for segregation and hyper-segregation. Polluting auto tippers are not the solution,” she said.
Bumping up figures
MCD, in a report submitted to the Supreme Court dated September 2, claimed that around 55% of the municipal solid waste generated in the city is being segregated at source and a target of achieving 90% segregation has been fixed for August 2026.
However, Atul Goyal, who heads the United RWAs Joint Action (Urja) — a collective body of resident welfare associations — said the claim of waste segregation is a farce.
“There are few planned colonies and individuals who are pursuing waste segregation at source. Even if someone attempts segregation at individual level, they get discouraged as it gets mixed at the second stage by MCD waste collectors and auto tippers,” he said.
This year, MCD undertook an audit of waste management and implementation of municipal solid waste management rules through the Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) which flagged that “32% of the daily 11,000 tonnes of waste generated by the city is leaking into environment and needs immediate attention”.
The audit further flagged that “ineffective waste segregation practices contribute to the impracticality of decentralized waste management systems in Delhi and inability to properly separate different types of waste makes it challenging to sustain decentralized approaches effectively”.
An MCD official on condition of anonymity said that ASCI had submitted a report but the corporation did not agree with all its findings. “All necessary steps are being taken to encourage segregation of waste without taking punitive measures. We are focusing on commercial and bulk generators along with zero waste colonies by providing incentives. Punitive action and fines are the last resort,” official added.
Separately, mayor Shelly Oberoi, in a letter to the municipal commissioner on September 24, even questioned the claims on door-to-door collection, stating that during her inspections, she found that “no door-to-door collection [was] happening” and that “piles of garbage had accumulated at several points”.
On the mayor’s allegations, the civic body had earlier stated that she was well aware of challenges and issues in solid waste management and she has been requested more than once to use her good office to get dues to MCD released from Delhi government.