Aravind HM finds out how the former royal capital got its cleanest city crown.

Keeping it local

At the crack of dawn, civic workers check into the zerowaste management plant at Kumbar Koppal in northern Mysuru. Over the next four hours, they collect segregated waste from 5,000 households and transport it to the plant, where the wet and the dry are sorted. As Gowri talks, her hands are busy treating the wet waste. “After 45 days of treatment, the wet waste turns into compost, which farmers pick up regularly,” she says. While the wet waste is turned into compost, dry waste, like plastic and glass, is sold.

This plant set up by the Mysuru City Corporation is one of nine. This decentralized approach to solid waste management has not only reduced the burden on the centralized plant, it’s also cut bills for transportation of garbage and reduced waste sent to landfills.

Thirty civic workers are assigned to one ward and collect the garbage and process it locally, explains D Madegowda, chief of Federation of Mysuru City Corporation Wards Parliament. “We generate Rs 25,000 a month from the waste, which we use for capacity building and creating awareness,” he says. But the biggest change he’s seen since he began heading the unit a decade ago is that Mysuru residents genuinely care about cleanliness. “And that’s what’s made the difference,” he says.

Tracking trucks

Spread over 128.42sqkm, Mysuru is smaller than most cities, but complaints of poor garbage collection were many. So, the civic body began tracking garbage collection vehicles, as an experiment, five years ago using a GPS-based fleet management system. Now, all 352 garbage trucks are tracked using GPS. “We track and monitor vehicles on a real-time basis, which helps us in effective handling of waste,” explains Mysuru City Corporation health officer Dr H Ramachandra. The corporation has also hired more civic workers. Of the 2.06 lakh households in Mysuru, 75% are covered by civic workers. Mysuru has also adopted biometric attendance systems to ensure that civic workers report to work on time.

Toilets in every home

Mysuru scored big both in sanitation and availability of toilets for tourists and residents. Popular tourist spots like Mysuru Palace, Mysuru Zoo, Chamundi Hills and Karanji Lake have public toilets besides community loos for locals. In 2014, Mysuru had lost out because of the problem of open defecation, but that has been fixed in the last two years. The underground drain network covers 98% of Mysuru. Its history also helps: Mysuru has had a sanitary division since the 1880s and laid an underground drainage system by 1910. The system is still functioning well, explains K S Raykar, a retired bureaucrat and an urban management expert. “Mysuru is a planned city and the administrators had factored in the needs of its residents a century ago. We don’t find such examples in other cities in Karnataka,” he says.

Royals to aam aadmi

When the news that Mysuru had retained its status as the cleanest city broke, among the first to call city corporation commissioner C G Betsurmath was Mysuru royal family member Pramoda Devi Wadiyar. Having led the campaign for sanitation from the front, she wanted to congratulate him. Along with her, the titular head of Wadiyar dynasty, Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar, joined the public effort to keep the city clean. “After we topped the ranking in August 2015, we focused on partnering with the community to continue the momentum,” explains Betsurmath. The response from people was good, and they helped keep clean up the city as well as stop others from littering. Now, the commissioner is planning to impose fines on those who litter or don’t segregate waste at source.

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