Indore in Madhya Pradesh has been adjuged as India’s cleanest city for the sixth time in a row. Explained How India’s Cleanest City Indore earns big bucks from its garbage.
Swachhata Survekshan 2022 was conducted among 4354 ULBs. These numbers include 62 Cantonment Boards and 91 Ganga towns. The study in 2022 paid close attention to the “People First” subject. The first Swachh Survekshan survey was conducted in 2016. With just 73 ULBs, it was a test project initially. On Saturday, President Droupadi Murmu announced the ranks and gave out prizes. The poll was done in two categories to determine the rankings of the cleanest cities in India. The first was a ULB with a population of more than one lakh, and the other had a population of less than one lakh.
Indore, located in Madhya Pradesh, is now ranked first, followed by Surat and Navi Mumbai. Intriguingly, a government survey shows that Indore has maintained its position as India’s cleanest city for the sixth straight year. Since 2017, the city has been at the top of the rankings. Surat achieved a hat-trick in order to claim the second spot on the list of the cleanest cities in India.
There were significant ups and downs in this year’s survey’s ranks. The first is Navi Mumbai, which will rise to third place in 2021 from fourth place. Despite not even making the Top 10 the previous year, Visakhapatnam managed to place fourth in 2022. From the third cleanest city in 2021 to the fifth cleanest in 2022, Vijayawada had a decline.
One of the main goals of the second iteration of the Swachh Bharat Mission, which was introduced last year, is to make Indore the first ever seven-star garbage-free city in India. Here is how the city handles its garbage while simultaneously making money off of it:
The Amount of Waste Generated
The commercial centre of Madhya Pradesh, which has a population of roughly 35 lakh, generates 1,900 tonnes of trash per day. The city produces 700 tonnes of wet waste daily and 1,200 tonnes of dry waste. A pilot project that was initially conducted in two wards has grown into a full-fledged exercise. Door-to-door rubbish collection wards were launched by the corporation in 2015 as a pilot programme in two wards. Encouraged by the response, they made the decision to use it exclusively. The IMC completed a complete door-to-door waste collection by the end of 2016.
Segregation of Waste
The waste in Indore is segregated into six types at a collection location, as opposed to the two categories that other Indian cities use (wet and dry waste).
Mahesh Sharma, the Indore Municipal Corporation’s (IMC) superintendent engineer in charge of the cleanliness branch, told Outlook that the organisation has 850 vehicles that collect rubbish from homes and commercial buildings and sort it into six categories. Wet, electronics, plastics, non-plastic, biomedical, and hazardous are the six categories. The vans also have distinct compartments for various waste types. For instance, used sanitary napkins are disposed of in different waste compartments.
Round The Clock Work by Safai Mitras
To keep the city clean, roughly 8,500 safai mitras are required. According to Sharma, these employees operate in three shifts.
The largest bio-CNG plant in Asia
The bio-CNG plant that runs on the moist waste collected from all across the city is the focal point of the civic body’s waste disposal procedure. Officials from the city claim that it is the largest such facility in Asia.
On February 19 of this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially opened the 550 MT per day facility at the Devguradia trenching area, which cost Rs 150 crore. It can produce 10 tonnes of organic manure and 17,000 to 18,000 kg of bio-CNG.
This Bio-CNG, which is Rs 5 less expensive than commercial CNG, is used to power around 150 city buses. A private firm paid the civic body Rs 2.52 crore as an annual premium for supplying garbage to the bio-CNG plant, while the civic body earned Rs 14.45 crore from waste disposal during the previous fiscal, including Rs 8.5 crore from the sale of carbon credits on the international market.
According to Sharma, the civic organisation expects to make Rs 20 crore from waste disposal in the current fiscal year. Also, Indore’s sewage is cleaned up at three different facilities and then used in 200 public gardens, farms, and building projects. (Source: The Quint)
