India has a growing waste problem on its hands that’s only going to get worse, with urban waste projected to increase 8 times by 2050 to 435 million tonnes. We have the numbers in the aggregate, and the numbers are staggering. Delhi alone generates 11,000 tonnes of waste every day, while Hyderabad and Greater Mumbai follow with 8,000 and 6,500 tonnes per day, respectively. Yet, there is insufficient data at the ground level to inform effective action. This data gap is a challenge across large cities today, but addressing it must begin now, before the 4,000+ urban local bodies grow and become unwieldy. While heaps of waste are visible everywhere, and some landfills are approaching the size of hills, when it comes to waste management, there are disconnects between planning and the ground.

The first major gap starts at the households and the streets – at the collection level. Collection systems are fragmented, with informal workers taking up a critical chunk of the work.  These workers handle a significant portion of our waste stream, yet they remain largely invisible in policy planning. While urban local bodies track GPS-enabled municipal vehicles religiously, monitor secondary collection points, and maintain detailed records of compactor stations, the parallel universe of informal waste management does not exist in our datasets. This invisibility creates suboptimal systems. When municipal corporations plan collection routes, they are working with incomplete information. Routes that should be optimal on paper don’t work the best in practice because they don’t account for areas already serviced by informal workers. The results are redundancies, unaccounted leakages, and suboptimal route designs. These wasted resources could have gone towards improving segregation while overlooking the capacities of the workers who are already making a living out of the ‘circular economy’.

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