ARTICLE | Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0
Why India needs zero-waste cities, not garbage free cities
O
On October 1 – a day before Gandhi Jayanti – Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a big announcement. The flagship and the equally lauded-critiqued central government program: Swachh Bharat Mission will now have a sequel. The Prime Minister said that with the Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0, his government aims to make “urban areas garbage-free”. He stressed that in the second phase - “garbage mounts in cities will be processed and removed completely as part of SBM-U”. Also going on to say that presently - “we are processing about 70 per cent of the daily waste;
38 October 2021 | www.urbanupdate.in
the next step is to take it to a complete 100 per cent.” The proposed program will also focus on source segregation of solid waste, utilising the principle of 3R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), scientific processing of all types of municipal solid waste and remediation of legacy dumpsites for effective solid waste management. As per the official release, the outlay for SBM-U is tipping to be around Rs 1.41 lakh crore. While admittedly rightly timed – in terms of the needs of Indian cities the flagship mission aims to signify a step forward in our march towards effectively addressing the challenges of rapidly urbanising India and the emerging climate challenges we are witnessing. But like the problem with
sequels, they are almost always worse than the original. SBM 2.0 might fare worse than its predecessor. The latest avatar of the mission lacks an on-ground understanding of waste management in its early conceptualisation, builds castles on the failures of the SBM 1.0 and is reliant on technology – privatised ‘models’ for solving complicated urban governance issues. Moreover, if smart cities are any cue to go by, the SBM 2.0 will be another scheme that aims for speed and scale but will fail to deliver and eventually come to a grinding halt. The SBM 2.0, with its push towards garbage-free cities, might lose the focus on recycling and decentralised handling of waste. Garbage-free cities will remove waste
