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The City Corporation of Panaji wants to discontinue the decentralised waste management system that helped it become a bin-free city

- Richa Agarwal

PANAJI WAS once on track to be a model city. In 2003, the capital city of Goa experimented with decentralised waste management system. This segregation of waste at source helped it become a zero-landfill, bin-free city within a decade. In 2016, Panaji received a Clean City Award by Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Science and Environment (cse). But one year later, the city’s decentralised waste management system is on the verge of collapse. What went wrong?

“Lack of administrative will can cause even the most efficient systems to crash. The current administration is disinclined to continue with the decentralised waste management. Instead, it plans to build a centralised waste management facility on the outskirts of the city,” says Swati Singh Sambyal, programme manager at cse. As a result, while the decentralised waste management system is still in place, the municipal corporation’s apathy has made it inefficient.

A system disrupted

Under decentralised solid waste management, Panaji’s 115 residential colonies are divided into 12 waste management zones, each under a supervisor, who manages collection and transportation of segregated waste. Households are required to segregate waste into five fractions: wet waste, plastic, paper and cardboard, metal and glass, and non-recyclables. Wet waste is sent to 100 composting units in the city, while dry waste is sent to 12 sorting stations (one in each zone) for further segregation. But when Down To Earth (dte) visited Panaji in May, only seven dry waste sorting centres and 50 wet composting sites were functional.