Indore: The Cleanest City paving way to cleanliness for Indian cities

Indore bagged the cleanest city award – Swachh Survekshan 2019 third time in a row and scored 4695 out of 5000. Indore first became ODF in 2017 and since then the city authorities have been putting efforts to keep the city clean. ULBs have adopted scientific methodologies for waste treatment, better policy framework on open dumping of waste, and much more. Big cities like Delhi & Mumbai must learn from Indore to improve their urban ecosystem

If the recent results of one of the world’s biggest cleanliness surveys done by the Ministry of Urban and Housing Affairs (MoHUA) are anything to go by, surely one thing stands out, and that is the discernible efficiency of most of the city managers of over 4300 cities. Madhya Pradesh has shown great awareness in keeping its many cities spic and span, with Indore leading the pack. Municipal governance in India has been seldom praised at any level. This is because our cities were in shambles and questions were always raised about the civic conditions of the ever growing cities. Water leakage from public taps, poor tax collection, bad roads, garbage dumps, building permission scams, substandard gardens, absence of public toilets, and dirty slums made our cities pathetic. A reason why Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, gave a clarion call from the ramparts of the Red Fort in 2014 to embrace cleanliness.
Overall pathetic conditions of the cities went on after the 74th Amendment to the Constitution in 1993, in what was called the archaic Nagarpalika Act. Mayors and councillors or corporators were made more powerful after dissolution of powers to the civic bodies but cities remained dirty and civic conditions unhygienic. After that followed many other schemes and policies aiming at improving our cities such as JNNURM which flooded the cash-starved municipal bodies with funds. With that came some structural reforms. Although urban development is a state subject, central funding from time to time was intended at introducing reforms in every aspect of the municipal governance. Then came the Smart Cities Mission, HRIDAY and AMRUT schemes sanctioned by MoHUA to spruce up cities, touted as growth engines of the Indian economy.
But clearly, municipal governance is changing fast as Indore has shown very prominently, and consistently this time round. The city has bagged the cleanest city award in 2019 once again. Indore has magnificently displayed how people respond to certain good ideas and schemes of government, if implemented well. Since Indore has topped the chart in all India competition of the ‘Swachh Bharat Mission’ of the Modi government, a look at changing nature of civic administration is timely. It’s also because Indore has shown the way to India, a country leading world’s largest cleanliness survey with 4237 cities fiercely competing and impacting over 40 crore citizens. Even the UN has praised and recognised Indore’s efforts.
Indore was adjudged as number one city for the third year in a row in 2019 for the innovative approaches it adopted in cleaning up the urban mess. The Agra Bombay Road, an important national highway passes through Indore city connecting Western India to the Northern. Incidentally, Bhopal was number two last year and this time it slid down to 19th but among the categories of clean capitals, Bhopal topped
the ranking.
What did Indore actually do to be the all India winner getting 4659 marks out of 5000? Well, the city, after winning the first position in 2017, went about methodically and maintained the consistency which, in other words, means sustainability of its efforts. It built on the base of 2017 in the next two years very scientifically. The commissioners kept gearing up its mammoth staff and their motivation snowballed into a big people’s movement. The Ministry had stipulated stringent parameters for the inter-city competition, which was supported by an independent agency Karvy Data Management Services Limited which made the assessment of 4000+ cities in a record time of 28 days. “All assessments of the ULBs were online, something that was done for the first time,” according to Durga Shankar Mishra, Union Urban
Affairs Secretary.
Indore first became an open defecation-free city and district in 2017 and then kept up the cleanliness drive across the city by creating awareness among citizens for segregating the garbage at source. Door to door garbage collection vans started moving into all the localities, entire municipal staff was motivated to bring Indore to the top. All zonal officers and lower staff of the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC), with an annual expenditure of close to Rs 5,000 crore, were filled with a rare sense of doing their duties more seriously than ever before. “It would not have been possible without the total support of people of Indore as also of my dedicated team of officers and safai karmacharis,” said a beaming Asheesh Singh, Commissioner for just about a year, and adding that “when ban on spitting on roads was imposed, people actually welcomed it”. Earlier, throwing litter on road was already banned and residents had been persuaded to keep a bucket inside their car to throw leftovers, cigarette butts, banana peels, plastic bags, trash etc. Asheesh Singh took over from Manish Singh in 2018. The former had started the drive which was clearly ungovernmental in its approach for the first two years 2016-17
and 2017-18.
Where one Singh left, another Singh took over with much more enthusiasm and zeal and in very organised manner. But what the two officers showed to the entire country is extraordinary in the annals of municipal governance. Asheesh did a stupendous job of cleaning up a huge garbage dump which was 40-50 years old and looked just like Gazipur dump near New Delhi, in less than one year. This dump site was spread over 100 acres of precious land which has been freed and reclaimed. A fast growing Indore has been generating 1100 tonnes waste per day and to treat it scientifically it required a very different approach which Singh could do very successfully and in a record time.
While on one hand the ODF drive was continued, Municipal officers took up the humongous challenge of collecting the city garbage and then processing it 100 per cent on daily basis at the old trenching ground. More than 800 rag pickers were employed to segregate the dry and wet waste but still they were not able to do the job fully. So the Commissioner set up mechanised segregation plant on the spot and reduced human intervention to the minimum possible. Wet waste was used to make compost and methane and with the dry waste segregation was done through the latest machines.
In all, after having the right kind of mix of men and machines, 300 tonnes was being treated daily with the help of robotic machine and modern plants, a task which had never been done before. Plastic to diesel plant was also set up there to clean up the decades-old garbage of 13 lakh tonnes which contained a large chunk of plastic waste. It’s a national record and other cities must surely learn from Indore, mainly Delhi and Mumbai where the garbage dumps have earned the mega cities a very bad name.
The garbage cleaning task has never been done anywhere in India on this scale and that actually tilted the scales in favour of Indore where the streets, roads, gardens, railways establishments, residential colonies, their backlanes and public toilets have been continuously monitored to achieve the crucial parameters of a garbage-free city. This year the MoHUA had introduced star ratings and an independent team of assessors went to Indore, like it went to other cities, for seven-stars category rating and found the city to be doing exceedingly well in all the parameters.
Any new visitor to Indore, for the past few months was easily noticing the marked change in the city. People say the frequent visits to hospitals by citizens has steadily gone down as water borne diseases have reduced, pollution is curbed and overall hygiene has improved a great deal and where maintaining cleanliness has become a second nature of Indoreans.