There is no magic wand. It requires a large workforce to be kept on its toes, eagle-eyed officers constantly on the watch, GPS-enabled fleet of vehicles collecting every bit of the solid waste and a large body of NGOs motivating citizens to be supportive of the administration.
Having emerged on top quite a few times and among the top-listed clean cities several times, it has taken monumental effort by the officials of the Mysuru City Corporation (MCC) to be in hot pursuit of the prestigious tag.
Mysuru, Karnataka’s Heritage City, receives nearly three million tourists around the year. Categorised under tier-II cities, is home to nearly a million people. Besides the usual tourists, the city, now a commercial, educational and industrial centre, receives nearly three lakh visitors a day. In order to maintain enduring appeal, the MCC has to spruce up the city by the daybreak when trains and buses from Bengaluru offload the early batches of visitors and tourists.
Piped water for all
Comprehensive coverage of households under piped water supply and sanitary lines holds key to efficient sanitation and public hygiene. If collection of solid waste management (SWM) could be carried out with commensurate rigour, serenity and cleanliness can be ensured for the urbanscape.
This has worked as the recipe of success for the MCC. Ninety eight per cent of the city’s households are connected to the underground sewerage while almost every single household gets piped water supply. When it comes to solid waste collection, the city administration ensures cent per cent door-to-door collection what with over 400 pushcarts transferring 402 tonnes of garbage to 165 auto-tippers on a daily basis.
While the MCC employs 560 pourakarmikas on its payrolls, another 1,650 safai karamcharis are deployed by the contractors to pick up the last piece of solid waste. Mercifully, the city does not have the truckers-corporators-bureaucrats nexus to fudge the data and extract their pound of flesh from the public funds.
Efficient segregation
Says M. Madhukar, Environment Engineer at the MCC, the solid waste undergoes segregation of dry and wet category at the collection point itself. Sixty per cent segregation is achieved at this level. But the MCC goes for a secondary segregation of waste into 24 categories at the Zero Waste Management (ZWM) plants, run by 47 NGOs which maintain as many dry waste collection centres. The waste is segregated into categories such as paper & cardboard, cloth, white plastic, tinted plastic, oil covers, milk sachets, tetrapacks, glass, metal and wood which these civil society organisations sell to recyclers. On an average, a ZWM plant earns ₹20,000 to ₹30,000 a month through sale of waste to the recyclers. The revenue subsidises their expenses.
Compost for farmers
Of the wet waste, nearly half goes to the central compost plant at Vidyaranyapura sprawling over 11 acres where it is processed mechanically. The resulting compost is given away to farmers who need to pay only loading charges for the same.
All that remains on an average day is 90 tonnes of wet waste which goes to the 7.25-acre landfill which has been scientifically constructed with a concrete crate embedded in the surface. The leachate from the landfill is taken to the nearest sewage treatment plant for aeration and treatment.
Bulk generators
The 30-odd bulk generators of SWM — shopping malls, theatres, hotels & restaurants, marriage halls, and convention centres, NIE, JSS institutions, Ramakrishna Ashram etc — have mostly constructed their own onsite biogas plants, mainly with the help of the National Institute of Engineering’s Centre for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (NIE-CREST) to generate biogas for their own use.
But the MCC is also in the process of setting up its own first biomethanation plant. This will take the bio-waste from the vegetable market and hotels and restaurants. Animal waste — 12 to 15 tonnes a day — from the city’s old slaughter house is sent for deep burial at the Kesare site by a battery of auto-tippers dedicated for the purpose.
Health Officer D.G. Nagaraju avers that credit for the city’s meticulous cleanliness must be shared with these NGOs and a highly supportive public which contributes hugely to the effort. “Without their support, we could not have won the ‘clean city’ honour year after year”, he asserts.
B.K. Suresh Babu, former deputy commissioner of the MCC (now Superintending Engineer at MUDA), says the citizens of Mysuru have contributed the ‘preventive part’ in keeping the city clean while the MCC has been carrying out the ‘curative role’.
RwH in place
As for sanitation,three sewage treatment plants with 157 million litres per day (mld) capacity handle the city’s wastewater. These are located at Kesare, Sewage Farm and Rayanakere.
The city introduced the byelaws for rainwater harvesting in 2012 for new buildings. Compliance has been over 90% as MCC does not issue completion certificates if the RwH arrangement is not in place. As of now around 7,000 new properties have reported compliance with the byelaws.
ODF Status
The MCC has taken the Prime Minister’s Swachchata drive seriously. According to Madhukar, the MCC has helped 425 individual households to construct toilets on their premises to achieve 100% Open Defecation Free (ODF) status for the city.
Funds were mobilised from sources like Swachch Bharat Fund, Urban Local Bodies Fund of the Union government, and CSR funds from JK Tyres. While the six major lakes come under the Lake Development Authority of the State government, the MCC has seen to it that no sewage is let into these lakes. Help has been secured from several private sector companies to build smaller STPs near lakes.
Toilet locator app
Looking at the vast floating population of the city, the MCC has put in place around 80 public toilets at busy thoroughfares which can be located by tourists with a ‘Toilet Locator App’. Of these, 19 units are maintained on a BOOT basis while tenders are floated for another 50 toilets.
Transparency
Efficiency combined with transparency has encouraged public participation in realising the dream of ‘Swachch Bharat’ in Mysuru. The 475 vehicles which are on the move round-the-clock are monitored by GPS. The monitoring has been outsourced to the Bengaluru-based tech company Kallatra which keeps track of movement, stoppage, and work of these vehicles of the MCC.
Says P. Prajwal, technology support engineer at the MCC, the fuel bills for the vehicles are issued commensurate to the distance logged and time spent by them. The vehicles can be tracked all through the day on the monitor in the GPS room of the MCC.
Mysuru and the MCC have indeed set a replicable model for several other cities. No wonder the city has been selected for ‘Best Practices Award’, ‘Community Participation Initiatives Award’, ‘Best Urban Local Body Award’ and myriad other honours year after year.
