Just saw a twitter link by Mark Thoma for a solar powered garbage compactor

and I thought..this is JUST what we need! When we were writing the Demand Curve piece on North India, I was a bit taken aback when I read Laveesh had written ‘Kanpur, north India’s industrial hub at one point, has now become a big garbage dump’, I thought that was a bit severe and thought I should tone it down a bit, but when I surfed to crosscheck this, I found the Municipal Commissioner of Kanpur calling it the dirtiest town in Uttar Pradesh!

All of urban India is turning into garbage dumps, actually, and hardly anything seems to be happening on that front. Though the Supreme Court has passed a ruling asking for segregation of garbage, for instance in Pune, action is zilch…I find this amazing piece from the TOI from 2005 talking of the PMC making wealth from waste…needless to say, the ground reality is nothing like that reported.

In early days of Indicus,..2001?.., Laveesh and Peeyush had done a paper on private and public garbage removal, which I cant find online anymore. But whether removal is private or public, enforcement of anti-littering laws will have to be public sector and a sense amongst residents of the need to be clean. But on both counts I am not too hopeful.

Last 5 posts by Sumita Kale

• Walk the talk with Steve Keen - February 26th, 2010
• Elinor Ostrom and Economics - October 13th, 2009
• Garbage - September 10th, 2009
• Energy and risk - August 27th, 2009
• Any defence for the dismal science? - August 19th, 2009

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 10:01 am and is filed under Indian Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.