Aafrin Kidwai 
It’s been two years since I took on the role of Editor-in-Chief of solidwasteindia.com – the first website dedicated to news and information on solid waste management (SWM) in India. Ever since, SWI has been focused on creating a reliable news and information exchange space to help waste sector professionals in their efforts. Each day, as our team scans online news and other websites for information related to Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) of interest to our target audience, mainly waste management professionals, we realise that information on the waste business in India in the public domain is scant.
To our credit, we have made substantial inroads into the waste-related news market over the last 24 months. Our readership has grown steadily and our interviews with sector leaders are hugely popular. As official media partners for the CII’s ‘Waste to Worth Conference last year (and this year again), we have helped build vital networks within the industry. More recently, our first webinar on ‘Optimising RDF from MSW for the Cement Industry’ met with resounding success.
Of course, it isn’t easy to find waste-related news leads. Informal sector networks, lack of capacity, non-transparency, and corruption are among the many factors that hinder information flow within this industry. Besides, waste management is still not a ‘high profile’ sector, despite all the attention from Swachh Bharat Mission since 2014. Good ol’ wet and other waste generated each day by 1.38 billion Indians isn’t still juicy enough to merit prominent space in the mainstream media.
Considering that landfills are among the biggest contributors to methane gas emissions, this is concerning. We spend so much of our energy ranting about climate change but the role of poor waste management as a key contributor is still vastly underplayed. Human lives are directly impacted by unscientific waste management on a daily basis, yet a lot of us continue to dump it indiscriminately. Out of sight, out of mind, quite literally.
At SWI, we hope that one day, waste and recycling will be discussed with casual ease among the concerned professionals and authorities, rather than remain buried as a single-column story on the inside pages of a city newspaper. With limited funds (no one likes to shell out advertising money in the waste business, do they?) and manpower, we strive to create content that informs and triggers concrete action.
Personally, as a journalist on the waste ‘beat’ for the last two years, it’s been an uphill task to constantly engage with waste management agencies, private and public. Public agencies, including ULBs and various Pollution Control Boards are largely unapproachable and hesitate to give official quotes for stories, while most private companies don’t have a media strategy in place or pretend they don’t need to share their work with the rest of the world via mass media channels.
If only we can all work together and create a generation of informed waste professionals (and citizenry, at large) by supporting news and information dissemination on this very important issue, our vision for a cleaner India will surely yield greater success.
Aafrin Kidwai is the Editor-in-Chief of SolidWasteIndia.com. She can be contacted on aafrin.kidwai@solidwasteindia.com
