Caravan Waste Article

7/28/2019 How people power forced a waste-management revolution in Kerala
REPORTAGE / GOVERNMENT
Raising a Stink 01 May 2017
How people power forced a waste-

management revolution in Kerala KUSHANAVA CHOUDHURY
People in the Vilappilsala village protest against Thiruvananthapuram Corporation’s waste-treatment plant in the
area. The agitation would go on to change the power dynamic between cities and villages in Kerala. COURTESY
MADHYAMAM
https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/people-power-waste-management-revolution-kerala 1/28
IN FEBRUARY 2012, trucks of the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation, loaded with

garbage, made their way out of Kerala’s capital, with several hundred policemen in tow.
The garbage was to be dumped at a site in Vilappilsala village, about 15 kilometres
outside the city.
At the Vilappilsala panchayat limit, the trucks were confronted by around 5,000
protestors, mainly women and children, led by the local panchayat’s president, Sobhana
Kumari. They had formed a human wall several hundred metres long. The policemen,
deployed to disperse the residents, lathi-charged and lobbed tear gas, but the protestors
refused to make way. Kumari and others were arrested. Prohibitory orders under Section
144 were imposed in the panchayat. But the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation had to
take its trucks back.
It was a do-or-die situation, Kumari told me when I met her in December, and her side
had prevailed.
The confrontation was the result of a con ict that had been brewing for several years. In
2000, the city of Thiruvananthapuram, formerly known as Trivandrum, contracted a
private rm to run a waste-treatment plant on land that the city had bought in
Vilappilsala. Initially, the plant ran e ciently—but problems emerged after a few years.
All the waste provided to the rm was not proving viable for the rm to process. Thus,
only a third of it was being turned into fertiliser. The rest was being dumped, untreated,
in an adjoining valley. Soon, the valley was covered by a heaving mountain of garbage.
Many of the people who lived around it sold their plots to the Thiruvananthapuram
Corporation and left. Their lands were absorbed into the land ll. The mountain grew.
The stink could be whi ed up to three kilometres away. Outsiders avoided visiting the
area because they would have to bathe immediately afterwards. Young people in the
locality found that prospective partners were reluctant to marry them.
In 2008, the corporation took over the plant from the private rm, and transferred
operations to a non-governmental organisation—but conditions did not improve.
Children developed respiratory problems and skin diseases. Some even had swollen
limbs. Many could not go to school. Agricultural land was becoming unusable, and
livestock were falling ill. Worst of all, the creeks that supplied the village water became
black with leachate, a tar-like substance that oozes out of untreated waste. As matters
got worse, the Vilappilsala panchayat approached the corporation with its constituents’
concerns.
In 2009, the corporation contracted a rm to cover the garbage mound with earth and
grass and create a moat to prevent pollutants from leaching into the water supply. But
the garbage kept coming and kept piling up—300 tonnes of it a day, the refuse of the
million people who lived in the state capital. A local organisation, the Vilappilsala
Janakeeya Samara Samithi, had been ghting for the rights of the villagers. Now, the
residents wanted the city to stop dumping in their village, period.
Sobhana Kumari became a councillor and the panchayat president for the rst time in
2010. That year, her ward seat and the panchayat president’s position had both become
reserved for women. Kumari had been a Congress party worker and the chairperson of
the local Kudumbashree programme—a massive women’s employment and self-help
programme in Kerala. She decided that the health problems of the people living next to
the land ll were going to be one of her central concerns as panchayat president.
These residents had been struggling since 2006, Kumari told me when we met in
Vilappilsala. “We felt there was no option but to ght.” At the time, the panchayat was
controlled by Kumari’s party, the Congress, but there were panchayat members who
belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party, as well as to the Communist Party of India
(Marxist). The CPI(M) led the ruling coalition in the state government and also
controlled the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation. “All people rose above party for this
issue,” Kumari said, “We transcended parties to ght the corporation.”
After Kumari took charge, she started fresh talks with the corporation about the waste
plant in her panchayat. The city promised to supply clean water in tankers to the
villagers to alleviate health concerns. It also o ered jobs at the plant to locals. But the
panchayat’s stand was simple. “We wanted the factory shut down,” Kumari said. As she
told me, the corporation did not yield. “They said moving the factory was impossible.”
Instead, the corporation proposed a new leachate-treatment plant to solve the water-
pollution problem. The panchayat was not interested. The previous technical x, of
building a moat to prevent leaching in 2009, had turned out to be a temporary measure,
which failed to x the problem because more garbage continued to be dumped at the
site. The panchayat stood by its demand to shut the factory down.
Thiruvananthapuram, the villagers said, should no longer dump its waste in their
backyard.
 (https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/people-power-waste-management-revolution-
kerala/attachment-10166)
This was when people became enraged, Kumari said. An indefinite hartal was called across the panchayat.
Protestors shut down schools and colleges and blocked roads. Political activists patrolled the streets. RAM
KUMAR / DOOL NEWS
But the trucks kept coming. In 2011, a Congress-led United Democratic Front
coalition came to power in the state. Kumari, who hails from a Congress family,
approached her party’s state leader and the new chief minister, Oommen Chandy,
to resolve the con ict between the city and the panchayat. Chandy agreed that the
plant should be removed and asked for six months to nd an alternate site for it,
she said. But the time expired and no new site was found.
In December 2011, the panchayat leaders and a ected villagers staged a sit-in by
blocking the road leading into the panchayat from Thiruvananthapuram. Trucks full of
garbage had to be sent back to the city. The battle had begun.
This was when people became enraged,

Kumari said. An inde nite hartal was

called across the panchayat. Protestors
shut down schools and colleges and
blocked roads. Political activists patrolled
the streets.
For the next ten months, Vilappilsala came under siege. The corporation led a petition
with the Kerala High Court. The court ruled in the corporation’s favour, ordering that
garbage trucks would continue to dump in Vilappilsala, with the state providing police
protection, and even mobilising Central Reserve Police Force personnel if necessary. The
panchayat appealed the ruling in the Supreme Court, but the court only reduced the
limit of garbage that could be sent, from 300 tonnes to 90 tonnes a day. The city had the
authority to run the plant, the court said. Thus, it was with the backing of the court and
the police that garbage trucks had attempted to return to Vilappilsala in February 2012.
Chandy’s government told the corporation to wait four months before sending any
more trucks. After four months, the corporation again brought up the plan to introduce
a leachate-treatment plant at the site. In August that year, the city sent machinery to
install the plant, but when the truck with the machinery reached the panchayat, it was
met with thousands of local residents, many of them women and children, led by
panchayat members. The police started arresting and removing the protesters to allow
the truck to pass. In response, the residents lit bon res on the road to block the truck
and the police. To douse the re, police used water cannons. The protesters fought back
with stones. The battle went on for two hours before the district administration nally
withdrew the police. They left the machinery at a local police station and retreated. The
panchayat thought the battle was over.
Then, one rainy October night, at around 3 am, Kumari got a call. “Corporation people
had gone in the middle of the night and xed the machine there” at the plant, she said.
“They then led a status to court that there was no more water-pollution problem.”
This was when people became enraged, Kumari said. An inde nite hartal was called
across the panchayat. Protestors shut down schools and colleges and blocked roads.
Political activists patrolled the streets. Running out of options, Kumari started an
inde nite hunger strike. By then, the movement, which was being beamed on 24-hour
television news networks, had garnered popular support across the state. Well-known
intellectuals, such as the activist and poet Sugatha Kumari, went to Vilappilsala to show
solidarity with Kumari. After four days, her health deteriorated and police arrested and
hospitalised her. Four other panchayat members, of di erent political parties, continued
the strike, until, nally, a deal was brokered by mediators. The corporation would not
reopen the factory, and could not use the site for dumping. A panchayat had taken on a
city, and won.
ps://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/people-
er-waste-management-revolution-
la/attachment-10167)
Sobhana Kumari, Vilappilsala’s panchayat president, successfully led the protests against Thiruvananthapuram’s
waste being dumped in her village. STEEVEZ RODRIGUEZ FOR THE CARAVAN
Meanwhile, a case between the corporation and the panchayat, which was ongoing in
the high court, was moved to the National Green Tribunal in Chennai. In 2015, the NGT
ruled that the plant was polluting the local water supply and was injurious to health, and
that it should be dismantled.
Vilappilsala’s struggle was the biggest mass movement in Kerala since the one in
Plachimada village, where locals had successfully thrown out a Coca-Cola bottling plant
that was polluting the water supply. But while Plachimada’s struggle was to defend local
interests against those of international capital, Vilappilsala’s was one to assert political
equality between villages and cities.
ACROSS THE WORLD, the most common way to dispose of urban garbage is to dump
it in land lls. In the United States or Canada, which have vast open spaces, more than
half of all garbage ends up in rural land lls. Even when the garbage is sorted at its
source, unrecyclable materials are sent untreated to land lls. Elsewhere, as in Germany,
waste is sorted and then the unrecycled waste is burned to ash in incinerators before
being sent to land lls. These dumping grounds often cause grave problems for towns
and villages located near them.
In 2006, a shipbreaking yard in Gujarat’s Alang denied entry to a French warship because it was believed to be
carrying hazardous waste. AMIT DAVE/ REUTERS
The use of land lls has become better regulated since the 1970s, when the
environmental movement emerged and forced governments to limit and control these
sites. In the US, as marginalised groups became more powerful and fewer dumps were
permitted next to populated areas. The term “Nimby,” an acronym for “not in my back
yard,” emerged to describe protest movements against proposed land lls or waste-
treatment plants. In time, some began using “Nimby” pejoratively, to describe people
who objected to the setting up of unpleasant and hazardous projects in their own
neighbourhoods, but had no objections to them being set up elsewhere. As these
protests gained prominence, in many cases, the Third World had to host what the West
did not want in its backyard. By the 1980s, millions of tonnes of waste were shipped
from First World countries to the Third World to be dumped. The most infamous case
of this involved the US city of Philadelphia, located in the state of Pennsylvania. The city
had been dumping ash in neighbouring New Jersey, until that state protested. In August
1986, 14,000 tonnes of ash were loaded onto a ship to be dumped abroad. In January
1988, roughly 4,000 tonnes of this were dumped on a beach in Haiti. When other
countries refused to accept the rest, another 10,000 tonnes were dumped, secretly, into
the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. The case led to the creation, in 1989, of the Basel
Convention, which seeks to limit the transport of hazardous waste across international
borders. This treaty has seen multiple violations since, as electronic and other forms of
waste from the West continue to be dumped in West Africa, South Asia and China.
Shipbreaking yards in the Third World can often be used to o oad hazardous waste. In
2006, the Clemenceau, a French warship carrying tonnes of asbestos was denied entry to
a shipbreaking yard in Gujarat’s Alang because it was believed to violate the Basel
Convention.
The transfer of the First World’s waste problems to the Third World is often called “toxic
colonialism.” In India, cities and states impose a similar process on their neighbours or
parts of themselves. But as recent events in Kerala show, when people on the periphery
are able to exercise political power, they stand up against their homes being turned into
dumping grounds for other people’s rubbish. The movement that Sobhana Kumari led in
Vilappilsala changed the power dynamic between villages and cities across Kerala. It
caused a cascade e ect statewide. Within months, almost all panchayats that had
municipal waste-treatment plants or dumping yards in their jurisdictions launched
political movements to get them shut down.
As for Thiruvananthapuram, when it violently fought the panchayat in 2012, its

municipal body argued that the closing of the Vilappilsala site would be catastrophic for
the city’s million residents. It was not. Four years later, it is the only Indian city of a
million or more people that has neither a centralised waste-treatment plant, nor any
land ll site. Faced with a shift in power, the city had to innovate.
ABOUT 130 KILOMETRES north of Thiruvananthapuram, Alappuzha is a picturesque

city on the Arabian Sea, often called “the Venice of the East.” It is shaped by two central
canals that lead from the sea into an elaborate network of man-made and natural
channels and waterways. These are called the kayal, or Kerala’s famed “backwaters.”
Each year, thousands of tourists from all over the world come to the city to take
houseboats through them.
Alappuzha had been dumping its garbage in Sarvodayapuram, a village within the
Mararikulam South panchayat. A con ict developed between the municipality and
panchayat that mirrored the one in Vilappilsala. A waste-treatment plant had been built
in Sarvodayapuram and was run by a contracted rm that failed to process all the
garbage that was sent there daily. The unsorted waste was dumped on site, causing a
stench, leakage into the water supply and health problems for local residents.
Within months, almost all panchayats

which had municipal waste-treatment
plants or dumping yards in their
jurisdictions launched political
movements to get them shut down.
In 2012, inspired by the success of Sobhana Kumari’s campaign in Vilappilasala, the

panchayat leadership in Mararikulam South also decided to act against the
dumping. Locals blocked roads and threw stones at garbage trucks coming from
Alappuzha. When this happened, the municipal government stopped collecting garbage
in Alappuzha. Hills of trash formed at many junctions of the city.
Both the municipality and the panchayat were then controlled by the CPI(M), but party
discipline could not paper over panchayat de ance. As in Vilappilsala, the issue
transcended partisan politics.
Sarvodayapuram and Alappuzha fell within the assembly constituency of TM Thomas

Isaac, the current nance minister of Kerala, who had also held the post in the previous
CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front government. As the area’s MLA, Isaac was particularly
well-placed to tackle this problem.
“I think it was very good that the rural areas said ‘No, we won’t accept your waste,’” he
said, when we met in Kochi in January. “So you have no choice. If centralised processing
is not an option, then what other option do you have? You have to decentralise, either in
the house or in your neighbourhood.”
He proposed a series of small steps to decentralise waste management in Alappuzha. His

emphasis was on residents sorting garbage into organic and man-made waste at home,
and then treating the organic waste at the source. He also proposed neighbourhood-
level units to process organic waste into compost. Man-made waste would be collected
by municipal workers on a weekly or monthly basis. There would be no daily garbage
collection, no centralised waste processing and no land lls.
I asked Isaac what gave him this idea. “I have always been a believer in decentralisation,”
he said. “Anything that can be done at the lowest level should be done at the lowest
level. Delegation should be the opposite: not what the top gives, but whatever can be
done at the lower level should be left to them. Only the residuals should go up. It’s called
the principle of subsidiarity.”
Isaac is an economist by training. For many years, he was a faculty member at the Centre
for Development Studies, a research and policy think tank in Thiruvananthapuram. He
had done his PhD at CDS as well, writing his thesis on the unionisation of the coir
industry in Alappuzha in the years between the First and Second World Wars. Since then
he has authored several books, in English and Malayalam, on workers’ cooperatives, local
government and decentralised waste management.
When we met, he was rushing from one event to another. We kept talking through a
lunch of rice and sh curry, and then I accompanied him to the Ernakulam Junction
train station, where he was to take a train for Kollam. At the station, police o cers
straightened up to salute him. Ordinary citizens came up to say hello, share a few words
or shake his hand. A senior station o cial came out to invite him to a new air-
conditioned waiting lounge. “That’s okay, sir, I don’t want it,” Isaac said in Malayalam,
before continuing to speak with me in English. We crossed a bridge over some tracks to
his platform, settled on a concrete bench next to a family with a child, and continued
our conversation until his train arrived.
When he speaks, Isaac seems like a university professor, rather than a politician. In the
last two decades, many LDF policy innovations, from the campaign for decentralised
waste managements, to programmes for organic farming and palliative care, have had
Isaac’s imprint. In Kerala politics, he has always been associated most with the People’s
Planning campaign of the mid 1990s, in which he played a key role.
The campaign brought to life the principle of subsidiarity that Isaac mentioned. In 1993,
the Congress-led central government passed these amendments, which brought forth a
new layer of government: the district, block and gram panchayats. The statutes ensured
regular elections of panchayat members, with 33-percent reservation for women, and
reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in proportion to their presence
in the local population. The idea was to move power away from state governments and
unelected civil servants and into the hands of elected local bodies.
The new laws broadly expanded the powers of democratically elected village bodies in
relation to state governments. But some intellectuals, led by KN Raj, the director at CDS,
felt that they did not go far enough. They saw the Panchayati Raj Act as an opportunity
to institute real bottom-up democracy. In 1996, a CPI(M)-led coalition came to power in
Kerala and passed sweeping reforms that expanded the centre’s legislation. Isaac, then a
professor at CDS, joined the state planning board, and was put in charge of the
decentralisation campaign. The state government also passed a radical law which stated
that alllocal governing bodies, be they panchayats, municipalities or corporations, were
to be given equal powers.
Kerala’s key innovation was to take planning outside the closed chambers of the state
planning board and to the panchayats. Planning thus far had been a highly centralised
process. In both the union government and state governments, it was conducted by
unelected bodies, called the planning commission or the planning board. The goal of the
People’s Planning campaign was to shift planning to the panchayat level. It recruited ex-
bureaucrats as well as local people with technical know-how, such as retired school
teachers, health workers and engineers, to draft plans. They drew on ideas of
participatory planning and budgeting that had emerged in Porto Alegre in Brazil, where
local communities, along with local experts, deliberated over and determined annual
budgets.
The Kerala Shasthra Sahithya Parishad, the leftist grassroots organisation that had
spearheaded a statewide science and literacy campaign in 1989, now mobilised
thousands of volunteers. Kerala’s rst communist chief minister, EMS Namboodiripad, a
man whose personal life was a model of Gandhian simplicity, was also a proponent of
democratic decentralisation, which he believed empowered workers and peasants
against elites. Namboodiripad, long after his political retirement, was made the
honorary chairman of the guidance committee of the People’s Planning campaign. In
each village, public meetings were held with the active participation of local people, to
draft plans for village-level development. At the time, Kerala had three municipal
corporations, more than 63 municipalities and roughly 990 panchayats. Three million
people attended these meetings and assemblies, and 120,000 people participated in the
planning process. Many of the plans involved water puri cation, improved health
services, or the construction of “women’s roads,” which would enable women to travel
to get water or rewood more easily.
From 1996, the state government devolved power over between 30 and 40 percent of the
state budget to local governments (panchayats, municipalities and corporations). These
reforms established a new structure of governance, which was based on rural and urban
parity. Many critics pointed out that the money was not well spent, or not spent at all,
because panchayats lacked the expertise to plan and administer complex projects.
Others said that the planning campaign was unable to institutionalise its innovations
once the initial euphoria died o . But one outcome of the reforms was clear nearly two
decades later.
I asked Isaac if he ever imagined that democratic decentralisation would lead to the
events that unfolded in Vilappilsala. “I did not think of this outcome,” he said, laughing.
“But we did expect that rural areas and communities would be standing up. There is a
tremendous con dence in the rural governments.”
IN ALAPPUZHA, for the rst few months after the garbage trucks stopped running, the
municipality buried garbage within city limits. But soon, these land lls became full. In
2013, under Isaac’s leadership, the municipality picked 12 out of the city’s 52 wards for a
pilot project that focussed on at-source sorting of organic and man-made waste and the
treatment of organic waste with pipe-compost units and biogas plants.
MR Prem, a schoolteacher, was a rst-time CPI(M) councillor in one of the chosen

wards. He himself was initially a sceptic. “How can a whole municipality’s garbage be
handled like this?” Prem recounted wondering. “We didn’t think that a whole town’s
municipal waste will go into composting. Where? How?”
“I think it was very good that the rural

areas said ‘No, we won’t accept your
waste,’” Isaac said. “So you have no choice.
If centralised processing is not an option,
then what other option do you have? You
have to decentralise.”
Nevertheless, Prem and other local leaders went from door to door in his constituency
to install pipe-compost units and biogas plants in people’s backyards. “Whenever Isaac
came up from Thiruvananthapuram, he would also go,” Prem said. “And people would
be in for a big surprise to see the ex- nance minister going to each household to talk to
them about biogas.”
“Initially everybody laughed,” Isaac said. “They also had no choice.”
There are 52 wards in Alappuzha, each with about 1,000 households. In Prem’s ward,
residents installed gas plants in more than 180 households, he told me. The gas plants
look like oversized kettles as tall as letter boxes. The state o ered them at a 75-percent
discount. This meant that a portable biogas plant would cost the householder around Rs
3,400, from which they could get 1.5 hours’ worth of cooking gas a day. Prem himself
installed a costlier, but more e ective, xed gas plant in his home. He gets 3.5 hours’
worth of cooking gas a day, he said—four hours’ worth on days when he also gets waste
from the vegetable seller’s shop next door.
In his ward, the majority of people opted for pipe-compost units, which yield manure
rather than cooking gas, and are cheaper to set up. He showed me the pipe-compost
mechanism: nothing more than two thick white tubes as fat as drainpipes, planted into
the ground, with holes at the top to allow for aeration. A user keeps dumping organic
waste into one pipe until it is full, and then closes it in a month. In a month, the
contents turn into manure. Meanwhile, the user can ll up the second pipe instead, and
then keep alternating between them. Most people use the manure as fertiliser in their
gardens. The pipes’ functioning replicates the manner in which composting has always
taken place in the countryside, where people simply dump their garbage onto fallow
land and let it rot into manure. The total cost of the pipes is about Rs 1,000, but in
Alappuzha a combination of state and municipal subsidies brought the price down to Rs
150. The system is so low tech and user-friendly that it is a wonder that it is not used
everywhere.
In 1991, the legendary Gandhian architect Laurie Baker published a book of sketches on Alappuzha, called
Venice of the East, which described its potential as a tourist destination if its garbage problems could be
managed and the canals cleaned up. COURTESY COSTFORD
Today, in Prem’s ward, 80 percent of all households have installed pipe-compost or

biogas units. In the past, biogas plants and other such technologies have failed to be
adopted elsewhere, even in other parts of Kerala, despite economic incentives such as
subsidies. People perceived the initiatives to be impractical and cumbersome. The plants
seemed di cult to operate and people worried that they would break down. One of the
innovations in Alappuzha was to train Kudumbashree women, who formerly collected
garbage from door to door, to repair biogas plants. Every ward now has technicians who
can be called if a resident does not know how to use a plant or if one breaks down.
After the success in the 12 pilot wards, the biogas and pipe-compost programme was
expanded to all 52 wards in the city. Moreover, the city installed aerobic composting
plants in 14 sites. Each site has about ten concrete bins, which look like stables for farm
animals, located inside a grill-enclosed shed. They are known as Thumburmuzhi bins,
after the place in Thrissur district where they were developed, by a veterinary university,
as a means to decompose animal carcasses. The municipality’s former sanitation
workers, who used to load the garbage trucks that went to Sarvodayapuram, are now the
technicians who run these sites. Each bin is rst layered with organic waste and then
with dry leaves sprayed with inoculum, a bacteria that hastens the composting process.
The plants look like car sheds, and are set up along major roads in Alappuzha city and
next to its canals.
“People would be in for a big surprise to

see the ex- nance minister”—Thomas
Isaac— “going to each household to talk to
them about biogas,” Prem told me.
“Initially everybody laughed,” Isaac, who is
back as the state’s nance minister, said.
“They also had no choice.”
Jayakumar C, a junior health inspector at the municipality, oversees the decentralised

waste-management process in Alappuzha. Jayakumar patrols the city on his yellow
scooter, wearing a yellow helmet, scouring the streets for any waste out of place. “Ten
percent of people still dump in the street,” he said. “We have ve autorickshaws go every
morning to pick up waste that we nd in the street. If we catch someone, it’s a Rs 2,500
ne.” The municipality also has a night-patrol squad: o cials who drive around in an
SUV after dark to catch illegal dumping along roads or in the canals. If they catch
someone, they call the police. Most of the culprits are owners of restaurants, juice shops
and fast-food joints, Jayakumar said. A rst o ence is punished with a Rs 2,500 ne; a
second o ence means an establishment’s licence is suspended, and it is closed for three
weeks.
The city carried out a large-scale awareness campaign, among everyone from political
workers, business owners and children. There were environmental clubs set up in
schools. Through all these measures, the municipality’s main accomplishment has been
to educate people on the importance of at-source sorting. A change of attitude has taken
place in the city.
In 1991, the legendary Gandhian architect Laurie Baker, who lived in

Thiruvananthapuram and specialised in construction from low-cost, locally available
materials, published a book of sketches on Alappuzha, called Venice of the East. Baker
described the city’s potential as a tourist destination if its garbage problems could be
managed and the canals cleaned up. Even before the Sarvodayapuram shutdown, the
dumping of garbage on roadsides and in the canals was common practice. The
decentralised-waste campaign in Alappuzha brought about a cultural shift in how
residents viewed their waste, and their city.
The change is apparent if you visit neighbouring towns in the district. Cherthala, 15
kilometres north, is a smaller town, with canals and temples, and an image of what
Alappuzha was like before. Hills of white bags lled with garbage line the roads. Many of
the canals are lthy. Cherthala resembles the Alappuzha described in Baker’s Venice of
the East. By contrast, Alappuzha today is the kind of city Baker had hoped it would
become: a destination for travellers from across the globe. The streets are clean and
dotted with homestays. Tourists cycle through the city and ride on boats along its famed
canals.
Last year, the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment rated Indian cities on
the basis of cleanliness. The purpose of the exercise was to identify new approaches to
waste management at the municipal level that were already working in Indian cities, and
could be emulated. It aimed to save Indian cities from importing expensive technology
and unsustainable waste-management ideas from Europe or North America—an
approach the central government seems to be promoting through the Swachh Bharat
Mission. In the CSE survey, Alappuzha was judged the cleanest city in India.
In January 2016, the smoke from fires that broke out at the Deonar landfill, the primary site for Mumbai’s waste,
engulfed high-rise housing societies in the more wellheeled parts of the area, causing many schools to shut
temporarily and creating respiratory problems for residents. SHAILESH ANDRADE / REUTERS
ALLAPUZHA'S SUCCESS raises questions about the e cacy of centralised waste

management, a model followed widely in rest of the country, and indeed all over the
world. In Kochi, Isaac had told me that he was against the very idea of a dumping yard.
When I asked him if he thought a major metropolis such as Delhi or Mumbai could
manage without land lls, he pointed to the examples of Alappuzha and
Thiruvananthapuram.
“Why can’t Delhiites process their kitchen waste?” he asked. “It’s such a simple thing.”
In Delhi, India’s capital, as the CSE report recognises, no coherent waste-management

programme seems to exist. According to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the city
generates more than 9,000 tonnes of garbage per day. There are no e orts to segregate
this waste at its source in any organised way. Rather, whatever is not picked o by
ragpickers and scrap dealers ends up in four municipal land lls: one each in Ghazipur,
Bhalswa, Okhla and a newly opened site at Narela-Bawana. Some of the waste at Narela-
Bawana is processed, but at the other three sites all of it is simply dumped.
Land lls have a life expectancy, usually of between 30 and 50 years, and a height limit,
usually of 20 metres. Once they exceed either, they are meant to be capped. Ghazipur,
Bhalswa and Okhla are all past their expiration dates, and over 40 metres high. The
bottoms, or the boundaries, of these sites are not sealed, and so the leachate seeps into
Delhi’s groundwater. The smells from these enormous open sites spread several
kilometres in all directions, like foul spirits guarding the city’s northern, eastern and
southern limits. Since most of the garbage is unsorted, an industry of ragpicking exists
on these land lls, mostly run by children who traverse the hills of waste without gloves
or any protective gear. Stories of children being attacked by rats and dogs are rampant.
Worst of all, the sites are always on re. Trapped pockets of methane from decomposing
organic matter erupt in ames in unpredictable patterns. One Indian Institute of
Technology study revealed that the burning garbage in Delhi’s land lls accounts for
between 7 and 9 percent of the city’s air pollution.
The situation in Mumbai is even more infernal. The city produces roughly the same
amount of trash daily as the national capital, the largest portion of which is dumped in
one site, in Deonar, located in the M East ward in north-eastern Mumbai. Each day,
5,500 tonnes of trash is deposited here. The waste here rises to a height of 55 metres. The
land ll has been in operation for 90 years. A 2016 IIT study found that there are tonnes
of methane at the Deonar land ll. The gas causes regular re outbreaks.
In January 2016, the smoke from these res engulfed high-rise housing societies in the
more well-heeled parts of Deonar, causing many schools in the area to shut temporarily
and creating respiratory problems for residents. The res made national and
international news. NASA satellites showed images of thick smoke emanating from the
dump. But many ragpickers in Deonar said that it was business as usual. The only
change was that the wind had caused a whi of their hard reality to drift into middle-
class Mumbai.
Around 600,000 people live in Deonar. There is no boundary between the dump and
the neighbouring slum. As in Delhi’s land lls, ragpickers work on the site without gloves
or any other protection. According to the Mumbai Corporation’s own human-
development report, published in 2009, the M East ward is by far the worst place to live
in the city. Most of the adults here are illiterate and most of the children do not go to
school. One does not survive very long in these conditions. According to the ward’s
records, the average age of death is 39 years.
Even in some of India’s most prosperous localities, the situation is dire. For a year, I lived
in Saket, a neighbourhood in south Delhi, which has three high-end shopping malls that
stock luxury brands from all over the world. There were properties in our residential
colony which were worth several crores of rupees, many of them homes of retired army
men and bureaucrats. Yet within our colony, a stone’s throw from these pricey
properties was an open garbage dump. Each day, two people would come with a
rickshaw and collect the garbage from our door with their bare hands, no uniforms, no
masks, no gloves. They would then cart it to the garbage dump, which was simply an
uncovered hill of the area’s collective rubbish. The workers spent most of the day there,
sorting the garbage—again with their bare hands—and then sold the recyclable
materials. On school holidays, their children would join them. Around them, there was
always an aggressive gang of dogs sitting in wait for a new stash of garbage, hoping for
food. In the spring, the dogs had puppies and their population grew. By the winter,
gangs of dogs roamed the colony and began biting passersby.
The men and women who collected our colony’s garbage were frequently berated by the
residents. They arrived late, sometimes they arrived drunk, sometimes they did not
arrive at all. On the days that they did not come, I would drop garbage o at the dump
myself. Seeing them spend their days sorting through trash, I wondered what I would do
if I had to live like this.
Thakazhi Pillai’s 1947 novel, titled Thottiyude Makan—translated into English as Scavenger’s Son—initiated a
cultural shift away from the practice of manual scavenging in Kerala. COURTESY DC BOOKS
The incongruity of the malls and the multi-crore properties alongside the open dump
reminded me of what the author Jane Jacobs once wrote about innovation in ancient
Rome. The imperial capital, Jacobs wrote, was justly famous for its magni cent
aqueducts but excrement still had to be carted out manually from private houses by
slaves. The problem was not one of a lack of technology, but of a distribution of power.
There was no pressure on Rome’s citizens to change the system. The work could be
passed on to slaves, who had no power to e ect any change. For Jacobs, the Roman case
held an important economic lesson: for cities to innovate, oppressed groups have to
have the power to force through ways to improve their own condition.
IF THE RADICAL SHIFT in Kerala’s attitude to waste management in the last few years
can be attributed to a legislative measure—the Panchayati Raj Act—a similar upheaval in
the state’s approach to manual scavenging was sparked by a novel written nearly 70
years ago.
Back then, most households, hotels and restaurants in India that had indoor toilets were
serviced by manual scavengers. Latrines consisted of toilet bowls that collected excreta,
were not connected to a septic tank or a sewer line, and had no water supply to ush the
waste away. The “night soil,” as it was euphemistically called, collected in the trough,
and the scavengers would go each morning from door to door with a broom and a
bucket, cleaning out the excrement from the latrines. This practice has still not
disappeared from homes in many parts of north India, even though it was outlawed
across the country in 2013. In the Indian Railways manual scavengers remain a part of
the workforce, collecting excrement that drops directly onto tracks from moving trains.
Until the 1950s, all municipalities in Kerala engaged manual scavengers. In 1947, a young
writer named Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai published a novel that changed this. Pillai
eventually won a Jnanpith award, and is remembered today as one of the canonical
writers of twentieth-century Malayalam literature. His book, titled Thottiyude Makan—
translated into English in 1993 as Scavenger’s Son—describes the lives of manual
scavengers in Alappuzha in minute detail, including their morning routines of
collection. A work of social realism, it was one of the rst novels in Malayalam to feature
the poorest of the poor as central characters.
In the years between the First and Second World Wars, Alappuzha was the centre of a
trade union movement in Kerala. The Travancore Labour Association had begun
organising coir workers across caste and community lines in the 1920s. Gradually, union
members took on issues of caste, such as entry rights into temples and untouchability,
and spread their organising to other industries across Alappuzha district. Pillai was
writing in the context of these changes.
Scavenger’s Son is the story of three generations of scavengers in Alappuzha municipality.

The father dies in the rst scene and for the rst third of the book, the family struggles
to nd a way to dispose of the body. There’s a gruesome scene where his body is buried
in the “night soil depot,” after which dogs dig into the earth and excavate his half-
decomposed remains, and then gnaw at the rest of him. A blue uid oozes out of the
corpse and his son, Chudalamuttu, witnesses the scene. He determines that he will not
su er his father’s fate. He attempts to become a new sort of person, thrifty, clean, god-
fearing and full of self-respect. Over time, he becomes a xer for the municipality
president, who rewards him generously for breaking up a scavengers’ union.
Chudalamuttu gets married and has a son. He keeps saving money, dreaming of building
a house with a boundary wall. He is determined that his son will not be a scavenger. He
gives the boy a posh name, Mohanan, dresses him in nice clothes and admits him to a
school attended by the children of the most powerful people in the city. He never even
touches Mohanan because he does not want the boy to have his stench. It is as if the
father believes that scavenging is a contagious disease that he could pass on to his
o spring.
In the book, a deadly epidemic of something like small pox or cholera sweeps through
Alappuzha every few years. In one such outbreak, both Chudalamuttu and his wife die
on the same day, leaving Mohanan an orphan. The boy drops out of school and becomes
a scavenger. Unlike his father, he joins a scavengers’ union and takes part in a strike,
during which he realises, as he famously says in the last chapter to his comrades, “It is
not the individual boss who is the worker’s enemy. It is the boss’s government.” He leads
a peaceful demonstration of strikers, but is then carried away by personal feeling:
wanting to avenge his father, whose lifelong savings the municipal president took away,
he burns the president’s new mansion down. Police re on their demonstration, killing
most of the protestors, including Mohanan.
As critics noted at the time the novel was published, Pillai’s key innovation was showing
characters never before seen in Malayalam literature. Scavengers were people no one
wanted to see, who did work no one wanted to do. People did not want to look at their
work, and kept a physical distance from their stench. The literary critic and communist
leader Joseph Mundassery wrote, “Only the life of the scavenger is told; but within that
echoes the whole range of bourgeois life in a modern town.”
The novel made people’s wilful blindness impossible. Soon after the book was published,
scavengers’ unions were recognised in municipalities and cities across Kerala and
manual scavenging was outlawed throughout the state.
In the 1950s, Alappuzha’s scavengers became waste collectors. More than 60 years later,
after the 2012 agitations, the town’s sanitation workers became technicians, who now
manage the 14 community aerobic plants and train people in how to handle their home
compost bins.
Reading Scavenger’s Son today, the novel feels somewhat dated and didactic. Pillai
himself moved away from this mode of narration, and from leftist politics, in later works
such as Chemeen and Coir, which are classics of twentieth-century Malayalam literature.
But Scavenger’s Son’s social impact is undeniable. The novel provoked a cultural shift in
Malayali society. After its publication, people could no longer treat their excrement as
someone else’s problem. They had to deal with their waste in their own homes. The
novel showed that there was no real need for scavengers as such. As Mohanan says,
theirs was a miserable occupation which had been created by governments. The same
governments could put an end to it if there was su cient social consciousness and
political will. What happened with manual scavenging in the 1950s in Kerala, is now
happening with the state’s waste management. When such a cultural shift takes place,
what seemed normal earlier becomes denaturalised. And what seemed impossible seems
necessary, even self-evident.
AS GROWING URBANISATION across India leads to more consumerism and waste,

the question is whether its urban spaces will look more like Deonar or like Alappuzha.
In Thiruvananthapuram, the corporation stopped collecting garbage when the

Vilappilsala site shut down in December 2011. Initially, there were large metal bins
parked at various points in the city, where residents dumped their garbage. For the rst
few months, the corporation buried the waste from these sites on empty plots within
city limits. Soon, it ran out of land lls. People simply littered on roadsides, producing
mountains of trash- lled plastic bags. The open garbage attracted rats and dogs. There
was widespread fear that a plague would hit Thiruvananthapuram, as it had Surat in
1994—fortunately, no such catastrophe occurred. For a few months, the city had
collection points for organic waste which was dumped in pits in a 1,000-acre rubber
plantation in a nearby panchayat, to make manure. By mid 2012, decentralised
alternatives such as pipe-compost units and biogas plants were being introduced.
Initially, they proved di cult for residents, who had not been educated in how to use
them. Many complained that the units were messy, or that they smelled. Residents did
not have the habit of sorting garbage at home. Moreover, the biogas plants would break
down and the city did not have a good system for repairing them. While the corporation
tried to deal with these glitches, garbage continued to be dumped in open spaces and
burned across the city of Thiruvananthapuram.
Alappuzha’s success raises questions about

the e cacy of centralised waste
management, a model followed widely in
rest of the country, and indeed all over the
world.
In November 2014, the corporation started the Ente Nagaram, Sundara Nagaram—or My
City, Beautiful City—campaign, run by Anoop Roy, a health inspector. The campaign
drew on the holistic approach of the Alappuzha model by focussing rst on a few pilot
wards and going door to door. It adopted special kitchen bins, developed by a scientist in
Coimbatore. These had the familiar shape of a dustbin, but contained ten kilograms of
inoculum in a coir pit at the bottom. The bins were simple, clean and easy to use. The
corporation launched a pilot project by distributing over 15,000 kitchen bins in 30 of the
city’s 100 wards, Roy told me. A contracted NGO periodically replenished the inoculum.
The processed waste became manure. Unlike in Alappuzha, where houses with
backyards are common, a large section of Thiruvanathapuram’s population lives in high-
rise apartments. The compact bins were an e ective alternative to the pipe-compost and
biogas units used in Alappuzha. The municipality also introduced “bio bins”—larger
plastic bins for composting that could be installed on a rooftop or in a parking area to
deal with the building’s collective organic waste.
Besides all this, the city also built 50 community biogas plants. These plants were prone
to frequent malfunctions, after which people would simply dump their garbage next to
them, creating a mess. Though the biogas plants are still functional, the city is not
investing in them anymore. Now it has built 17 community aerobic-bin units similar to
the ones in Alappuzha, where locals can bring their organic waste. Citywide, it has also
installed 87,000 pipe-composting units, and more than 2,500 portable biogas plants in
households, and introduced myriad disaggregated schemes to deal with waste from
commercial establishments. Waste from chicken shops, for instance, is processed into
sh food.
In the ten days that I spent in the state’s capital in December, although I did notice a few
isolated areas where unsorted garbage was piled in the street, and, more commonly,
where garbage was burned illegally, these problems were by no means widespread.
Thiruvananthapuram is a clean city relative to most Indian metros, including Kochi,
Kerala’s business centre, which still has a traditional door-to-door garbage-collection
system.
Currently, the 30 wards that were part of the kitchen-bin campaign are producing zero
waste, Roy told me. The challenge in the remaining 70 wards is that people are not
sorting at source. “They are still burning garbage,” he said. Though the police have
started handing out notices to those who do this, they have not introduced any kind of
punishment yet. “We want to educate people rst to not do this,” Roy said.
The programme is now targeting students, hoping they will be catalysts for behavioural
changes in the household. Isaac wants to turn every kitchen bin in the city into a science
project, with students observing the bins in their houses and writing reports. “I will
spend one crore so that every kid who writes a project on the kitchen bin in his house
will get a book,” he said. “They will want a kitchen bin in their house just so that they
can write a project.” Isaac said that the sum devoted to giving children’s books as prizes
will be money well spent if it can provoke the kind of cultural shift that Pillai’s novel
started. “How much is the cost of a centralised plant?” he asked. “It costs hundreds of
crores.”
Recently, in what seems to be a natural progression from events in Alappuzha and

Thiruvananthapuram, the Public Policy Research Institute, the state’s government think
tank, called for an end to centralised waste management in Kerala. The institution noted
how the Kerala experience shows that private rms contracted to run centralised
treatment plants fail to make waste treatment pro table and clean. Moreover, the
institute said, technology-intensive solutions—which are being adopted widely across
urban India—are too expensive for most Indian municipalities and corporations. As a
result, new solutions have to be imagined.
The state government has now adopted a policy of decentralised waste management for
all municipalities. It has sent guidelines to all cities and towns on how to segregate
garbage at home, and how to collect and recycle man-made waste that cannot be
composted. Keeping with Kerala’s tradition of decentralised planning, the municipalities
will develop their own solutions and policies based on these guidelines, rather than
being forced to adopt a uniform state model. In December, the state government
launched the Haritha Keralam, or Green Kerala, mission, which includes waste-
management projects headed by K Vasuki, an IAS o cer. The mission aims to craft
integrated policies on water management, waste treatment and organic farming. The
three issues are connected, Vasuki told me, as untreated waste invariably ends up
polluting the water supply and because converting organic waste into compost can be a
step towards invigorating urban organic farming.
Kerala’s finance minister, Thomas Isaac, wants to turn every kitchen bin in Kerala into a science project, with
students observing the bins in their houses and writing reports. STEEVEZ RODRIGUEZ FOR THE CARAVAN
Currently, though treating organic waste at home is becoming increasingly common,

there is not a widespread solution for processing dry waste. Many municipalities
contract Tamil Nadu rms to cart away non-biodegradeable refuse. Once the waste is
transported to Tamil Nadu, its management is sub-contracted to informal rms and
dealers who sort and recycle it. After this waste leaves Kerala and changes hands
multiple times, its fate becomes unclear and it is possible that some of it ends up in
land lls. The Kerala government plans to move away from this system of outsourcing
management of man-made waste and establish recycling plants, especially to process
plastic, in industrial areas in each district. Vasuki said that the challenge of managing
plastic is also an opportunity: these factories can begin a new industry, and bring new
jobs to the state.
It has been 70 years since Scavenger’s Son was published. The night-soil depot in the
novel where Chudalamuttu’s father was buried is based on a real place. It was located in
the village of Sarvodayapuram. When manual scavenging ended, the same site became
Alappuzha’s municipal dump, over which local panchayat and municipality did battle a
half-century later. The Alappuzha municipality still owns the plot of land. It has lain
unused since the 2012 protests, but soon there may nally be a sense of closure. “We are
thinking of turning the site into ats,” Prem, the councillor, said. “Or a stadium.”
KUSHANAVA CHOUDHURY (/AUTHOR/846) is a former Books Editor of The Caravan. He is the author of The Epic
City: The World On The Streets of Calcutta (Bloomsbury 2017).
KEYWORDS: Kerala(/tag/kerala) sanitation(/tag/sanitation) waste management(/tag/waste-management)
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7/28/2019 How people power forced a waste-management revolution in Kerala

Raising a Stink 01 May 2017

How people power forced a waste-

IN FEBRUARY 2012, trucks of the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation, loaded with

This was when people became enraged,

Kumari said. An inde nite hartal was

As for Thiruvananthapuram, when it violently fought the panchayat in 2012, its

ABOUT 130 KILOMETRES north of Thiruvananthapuram, Alappuzha is a picturesque

Within months, almost all panchayats

In 2012, inspired by the success of Sobhana Kumari’s campaign in Vilappilasala, the

Sarvodayapuram and Alappuzha fell within the assembly constituency of TM Thomas

He proposed a series of small steps to decentralise waste management in Alappuzha. His

MR Prem, a schoolteacher, was a rst-time CPI(M) councillor in one of the chosen

“I think it was very good that the rural

“Initially everybody laughed,” Isaac said. “They also had no choice.”

Today, in Prem’s ward, 80 percent of all households have installed pipe-compost or

“People would be in for a big surprise to

Jayakumar C, a junior health inspector at the municipality, oversees the decentralised

In 1991, the legendary Gandhian architect Laurie Baker, who lived in

ALLAPUZHA'S SUCCESS raises questions about the e cacy of centralised waste

In Delhi, India’s capital, as the CSE report recognises, no coherent waste-management

Scavenger’s Son is the story of three generations of scavengers in Alappuzha municipality.

AS GROWING URBANISATION across India leads to more consumerism and waste,

In Thiruvananthapuram, the corporation stopped collecting garbage when the

Alappuzha’s success raises questions about

Recently, in what seems to be a natural progression from events in Alappuzha and

Currently, though treating organic waste at home is becoming increasingly common,

KEYWORDS: Kerala(/tag/kerala) sanitation(/tag/sanitation) waste management(/tag/waste-management)

Health(/tag/health) Thomas Isaac(/tag/thomas-isaac) Thiruvananthapuram(/tag/thiruvananthapuram)

urban studies(/tag/urban-studies) dumping yards(/tag/dumping-yards) waste treatment(/tag/waste-treatment)

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Modi’s forgotten The orators helping Inside the killing elds

COMMUNITIES POLITICS BUSINESS

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