Our approach is to work with municipal bodies  to establish mechanisms of Decentralized Solid Waste Management through segregation of waste at source, transportation and linkages to economic activities such as composting and recycling. This would help further improve the expertise, efficiency and enforcement in urban sanitation for wider replication and scaling up of ‘Citizen Approaches to Sanitation’.

To create ‘No Open Waste’ (NOW) cities, decentralized management of waste is propagated by creating awareness for segregation of waste at source through workshops, seminars, training programs and handholding from the level of Municipal Corporation cascading to each ward, cluster and sub-cluster level, thus reaching every household of the city through a door-to-door-visit approach. The focus is to adhere to the Municipal Solid Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000 and help streamline the process right from segregation, collection, minimizing transportation, treatment or processing of waste and safe disposal.

The objective of handholding support is to educate the households for segregation of waste at source, building capacities of  waste collectors and implementing CAS at the citizen-level. The idea is to provide technical support in the implementation of the program initiatives to create demonstrable units for ‘NOW’ zones and wards by using a multi-stakeholder approach in a time-bound manner. Based on the learnings from this demonstration, the government may suitably scale-up the approach across the city in different phases.

While the focus of the projects is to improve sanitation and hygiene, the initiatives are expanded towards other related verticals such as health and nutrition, education, women empowerment and income generation to help contribute towards the holistic development of the citizens as well as the society.

Community-based approach for self-analysis and need assessment

• Including stakeholders at all levels, reaching out to all pocket-slums, markets, residential areas, parks and hospitals
• Collection of data in a participatory manner
• Use of community-based triggers for mobilization
• Institutionalization of community leaders for efficient information collection, situation analysis, community mobilization and monitoring
• Capacity building of all stakeholders
• Use of advanced statistical methods for data analysis

• Community mobilization using participatory and all-inclusive CAS approach
• Encouraging local innovation on sanitation technology
• Daily follow-up and monitoring
• Facilitating institutionalization of natural leaders in the community
• Facilitating effective service delivery by creating linkage between the community and the city administration
• Facilitating total sanitation initiatives such as open defecation free status, solid and liquid waste management and storm water management
• Facilitating movement from centralized to decentralized sanitation practices