Swach Bharat Mechanizing:Point raised by Sandip Sen in ET

1) Take up manufacturing of garbage collecting trucks and mini trucks locally. Involve the Tata, Leyland and Mahindra groups and make them invest in manufacturing these special purpose trucks locally. This is needed because only these companies have servicing networks across India and automated garbage collection trucks need very high and continuos maintenance. It is also important to keep the import bill low while mechanizing Swachh Bharat so getting Indian manufacturing cracking in developing these items are vital
2) Fund the purchase of these trucks through a central funding agency. Municipal corporations across India are financially broke, corruption ridden and faction driven and cannot invest in such expensive equipment. Each municipal corporation must be allocated a fixed number of trucks that they can finance through the central scheme.
3) A separate scheme should be launched for funding a ten year annual maintenance contract for such equipment that municipal corporations can avail.
4) To collect an additional 100 million tons of municipal garbage each year that stays on the streets of India, we would need 500 million additional bins by the street side from where the forklifts or the mechanized vacuum trucks could lift the garbage off the roadside.
5) There are many other smaller mechanized cleaning and lifting equipment that people in the western societies use from the ubiquitous 3M mop to the small but powerful, manually driven vacuum equipment to suck out garbage off clogged sewers. Some of these are really very innovative and powered to save the ignominy of manual scavenging. All these need to be sold and also manufactured in India.
6) Then there is the issue of setting up compost plants and RDF units so that garbage is not burnt in incinerators. There are unfortunately no working plants for RDF in India and the 6 waste to energy projects through the incinerator route are all failures and instead of being eco-friendly are an environmental hazard . It is only in March 2015 that an fully integrated RDF plant that is being currently set up by IL&FS will be commissioned whose results could make a difference.
7) Indian entrepreneur K.S. Sivaprasad, who was forced to quit India due to bureaucratic hurdles, corruption and antiquated laws set after working here to develop a low cost RDF ultimately set up his first full-scale integrated waste to energy plant in Malaysia that chews through 700 tons of garbage a day and delivers 5.5 megawatts to the power grid. Sivaprasad is currently setting up the second plant of 10MW for Malaysia.
8) Waste management roadmap that exists today at the MNRE is obsolete and needs to be updated with independent focus on Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Each of these are billion dollar opportunities that can be an earning proposition for the economy using the right technology tools not a drain on the Government budget if approached rightly.
The Modi Government needs to operate with an eye on scalable solutions because wielding the broom can only be symbolic and not a real solution to Swachh Bharat namely cleaning India. more