Solid waste management is one of the biggest challenges in the Indian cities. People are inconvenienced and face several health problems due to poor waste management system. Municipal Corporation Chandigarh has taken impressive measures to ensure effective management of solid wastes.

The programme, “Tracking And Monitoring Of Municipal Solid Waste” has been implemented with the objective of, (a) Lifting of garbage bins in a time-bound manner from the different locations in the city; (b) Monitoring the movement of all the vehicles (dumper placers) and in turn tracking the lifting and transportation of municipal solid waste in the city; (c) Reduction in cost in terms of quantity of fuel consumed by reducing the number of trips of vehicles; (d) Reduction in repair and maintenance of the vehicles; and, (e) Improving the satisfaction of general public.

Challenges

The Corporation faces huge task of managing waste and maintain cleanliness in the city. Municipal Corporation Chandigarh manages solid waste in 56 Sectors, 41 urban slums/colonies and nine villages apart from erstwhile N.A.C. Manimajra. Nearly 350 million tonnes of municipal solid waste is generated per day in Chandigarh. It is handled and collected door-to-door by cycle rickshaw carts. After sorting of useful components, the garbage is filled in garbage containers of 4.5 cubic million capacity placed at 35 Sehaj Safai Kendras and other earmarked locations. The transportation of the municipal solid waste in the city is being done with the help of dumper placers.

The challenges faced before the deployment of the project was to have a complete track of lifting and transportation of the solid waste in the city. The challenge was to ensure that the lifting should be done in a time bound manner.

Solution

Municipal Corporation Chandigarh has started the monitoring of garbage bins with an online application. The application has been developed with the help of National Informatics Centre (NIC), Chandigarh. Unique identification numbers have been provided to bins, location, drivers and vehicles. Every vehicle has been mapped with the location assigned to it. Moreover, bins have also been assigned particular group of locations. The Municipal Corporation Chandigarh has made an entry point at the dumping ground, wherein each and every dumper has to record before taking the garbage to either the processing plant or dumping ground. The web-based application is smart enough to display the location of bin from it has been taken through the existing database.

Outcomes

The initiative has led to significant improvements in lifting of garbage bins in timely manner. This has resulted in improvement in overall cleanliness in the city.

Before the implementation of this programme, some of the drivers used to lift bins according to their convenience, while in some areas wastes were left. It was difficult to find the erring drivers. Under the new system drivers are required to send an SMS at the time of lifting of garbage bin with the unique ID of the garbage bin number to the server. The server automatically picks the location of that particular garbage bin. This ensures that the garbage is lifted from all designated locations.

Now the monitoring officer sitting in the office can see, (i) How many times the bin has been lifted from a particular location in a week; (ii) Total weight lifted from a particular location in a week; (iii) Total distance covered by each vehicle; and, (iv) Total number of trips of a vehicle in a particular time, etc.