Aanchal Bansal 
Haryana’s Charkhi Dadri aims for number one spot in Swachta Survekshan survey by removing legacy waste at landfill site and setting up centralised waste segregation and recycling units, reports SolidWasteIndia’s Aanchal Bansal
After grabbing the eleventh spot (North Zone) in the Swachh Survekshan cleanliness survey this year, Haryana’s Charkhi Dadri is aiming for the number one spot in 2021.
The city in the semi-rural region of Haryana has witnessed rapid urbanisation over the last five years and is now looking at now exploring bio-mining methods to get rid of its mounting legacy waste as well as setting up a centralised Material Recovery Facility (MRF) to ensure efficient waste management in the city.
Awarded the “Fastest Mover City” in the North zone, Dadri climbed from 850 in 2019 to 11 this year. This was mainly due to the collaborative efforts of the municipal council and students from Ashoka University as part of the Chief Minister’s Good Governance Associate Programme (CMGGAP) in the state of Haryana.
The collaboration mainly involved organising door-to-door awareness campaigns for waste segregation at the household level and sensitising citizens towards effective waste management as well as deploying GPS enabled e-riskshaws for waste collection. Ensuring social security for waste pickers as well as providing them with adequate training for handling waste were some of the important systemic changes undertaken as part of the initiative.
“These were simple measures taken to overhaul the waste management system in the city that worked well because Charkhi Dadri is still a small city with 21 wards,” explained CMGGAP fellow Akshay Joshi, who works as a consultant with the Directorate of Urban Local Bodies in Haryana and helmed the project in Charkhi Dadri.
The next step now is to ensure effective recycling units and MRF facilities, says the 24-year-old consultant. “We managed to put in a system to streamline the waste management system in the city. The next step is to set up systems that will help tackle garbage after it has been collected,” he explained.
“The MRF will be a facility where the segregated dry waste will be segregated further by trained waste pickers. The municipal council will have no stake in the segregated scrap and the waste pickers will be entitled to sell the scrap to the local Kabad (scrap) market,” Joshi added.
While the construction of the MRF has been underway since January 2020, partly hampered by the disruption caused by the COVID 19 outbreak, the municipal corporation is also looking at setting up a centralised collection centre, on the lines of the collection centres set up by the municipal corporation in Pune. This is mainly to ensure the effective functioning of the MRF that is underway.
“We need waste to be properly segregated before it reaches the MRF. While we have carried targeted campaigns to sensitize citizens about segregation and waste disposal, segregation at source remains a challenge,” Joshi explained.
The municipal council is also looking at floating tenders to hire an agency to help clear the legacy waste in Dadri’s landfill site, presently located 3 km away from the city.
“We have already floated a tender for clearing the landfill site in Gohana and are expecting for things to move in Charkhi Dadri too,” said municipal officer Rakesh Verma, who was closely associated with the project last year.
“These cities (Charkhi Dadri and Gohana) are growing at a rapid pace, so we need to act fast and put systems in place to ensure proper waste management,” he concludes.
Picture Credit: Municipal Council of Charkhi Dadri
