Practice what you preach, BMC told, on SWM draft bye-laws
MUMBAI: 'Practice what you preach' is one of the messages for the civic administration, which has invited suggestions and objections to its draft Municipal Solid Waste (Management & Handling) Cleanliness and Sanitation Bye-Laws 2025. With only two to go before the deadline to submit them, HT asked experts and activists to weigh in on the proposed bye-laws. Some also questioned how waste collection and segregation would be carried out in slums, while others focused on the missing role of informal waste pickers in the system.
'My main contention is that the BMC is itself not equipped to deal with what it is asking of citizens,' said Debi Goenka, executive trustee of the NGO Conservation Action Trust (CAT). 'Even when citizens segregate their waste into dry and wet, the BMC is often seen mixing the two, bringing citizens' efforts to nought.' In other words, Goenka said, the BMC doesn't practice what its bye-laws preach.
Goenka also wondered how the civic administration proposed to enforce a whole new set of rules when there were ample gaps in infrastructure and implementation of the BMC's policies. 'The BMC talks about prohibiting littering, but there are far too few public bins and the ones that are there are often overflowing,' he said. 'Now, all of a sudden, the civic body is expecting homes to segregate waste into four categories. Yet there is little on the BMC's responsibility for providing the proper infrastructure for storage, and timely and proper segregated collection of the waste.
'They are also making it compulsory for bulk waste generators to compost wet waste within their own premises, but most lack any space to walk in their housing societies, occupied by parked cars. Even the latest Development Control Regulations (DCR) don't mandate space for this during construction,' Goenka said.
He made another powerful point. 'There is no onus on the manufacturers of waste, especially plastic. Instead, they have introduced loopholes which allow manufactures to escape the rules with regard to plastic waste, simply by saying it will apply to those with the 'main component' of plastic. This is an easy way out for manufacturers producing tetrapacks,' he said.
Kedar Sohoni, founder of the NGO Green Communities Foundation, highlighted the glaring lack of attention to waste in slums and the role of informal waste pickers in the system. 'In the slums, even simple door-to-door waste collection is broken. Most dump their garbage in community bins, which means no segregation,' he said, at a townhall on solid waste management, organised by Mumbai Donut CoLAB with other NGOs, on Wednesday.
'Neither have they taken steps to integrate waste pickers into the system, when ideally, they should be an integral part of the waste collection process, doing the door-to-door collection of segregated waste,' he said.
Sohoni pointed out that the dry waste segregation centres, meant to sort dry waste at the ward level and dispatch it for recycling, are falling apart. 'The BMC should extend the consultative process on the bye-laws and work on improving them,' he said.
Natasha D'Costa, founder of the NGO Start Upcycling Now, and who was also present at the townhall, said, 'The bye-laws make no mention of waste pickers. Rather, they state that all the waste will go to the BMC. This leaves the question of what will happen to private vendors and the unorganised sector, which forms the backbone of the unorganised waste market.'
Meanwhile, Goenka, Sohini and D'Costa welcomed the BMC's decision to defer the user fee for garbage collection in Mumbai. 'The BMC has not provided a rationale for charging the fee, when we're already paying property tax, which is meant to cover these services,' said Goenka. In any case, Sohoni said, any user fee should be based on the volume of waste generated, not the area of the home. 'This gives an incentive to citizens to reduce their waste, rather than continuing to generate more waste as they're paying for it,' he said.
Until now, over 2,500 responses have been submitted to the draft bye-laws, a substantial number relating to the now-deferred user fee.
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