The dabba gangs

Litterbugs pay up

Cleaner air and water

Last week, an e-rickshaw driver was beaten to death in northwest Delhi because he stopped two people from urinating in public. Many Indians don't take too well to being corrected in public. But Indore has emerged as a bright spot in the movement for public cleanliness. The city, with a population of 35 lakh, moved up from Rank 149 in 2014 out of 476 cities to the No 1 spot in Swachh Sarvekshan 2017. How did this popular business and education hub accomplish this in less than two years?"Khule mein nahi karna, uncle," pipes a pint-sized person in a TV advertisement, telling an adult to stop urinating or defecating in public. Such messaging works in tandem with infrastructure. During 2015-2016, the municipal corporation built and repaired 230 urinals, 17 mobile units, 400 modular toilet seats, 13,000 individual household toilet units and 243 community and public toilets. "The big challenge was to convince people to use these facilities," says Asad Warsi from Eco Pro Environmental Services, who worked as a consultant for the Indore municipal corporation.Enter the 'dabba gang'. Armed with nothing but a tin box with some loose change, young volunteers would make a noise as a warning to those relieving themselves in the open to beat it as part of their 'roko aur toko' (interrupt and stop) plan. "Hum to bilkul besharam ho gaye (we would not be embarrassed). We would go to places where people were defecating in the open at 5am. They tried to evade us by coming out an hour earlier, but then so did we. They would run when they saw us, but we chased them to their house to collect the fines," says Shrigopal Jagtap, a dabba gang leader and director of NGO Basix Municipal Waste Ventures. Even children formed a 'vanar sena' to chase open defecators. By January, the city was declared open-defecation free.Then they tackled the garbage problem. Indore today generates over 1,000 metric tonnes of garbage a day and all of it is collected from the source whether it is a household or commercial establishment. The door-to-door service was started in June 2015 as a pilot project in two of the 84 wards in the city. It took almost a year but civic officials say the city has achieved 100% door-to-door garbage collection and over 30% segregation of waste. "The aim was to make the city bin-free, dust-free and litter-free," says Manish Singh, municipal commissioner. Mini-tippers would go from home to home, accompanied by NGO and municipal workers, exhorting people to give them garbage. Empty plots were cleared, encroachments removed and people fined on the spot for littering or spitting. "We collected over Rs 80 lakh in fines. We caught the big fish and the small — if they littered they would have to pay," Singh says.Jagtap, from the NGO Basix, says that volunteers would even rummage through garbage to check who had dumped their trash outside. "We would check through the bags to find the name and address of the person and land up to collect a fine," he says. Even marriage and religious processions and rallies were not spared. "We also made sure such people were named and shamed. Eventually, people realised there was no way to get out of it and mended their ways," he adds. Some volunteers dressed up as Mahatma Gandhi to urge people to refrain from littering. One of the big achievements was to turf out illegal cattle shelters out of the city, putting an end to the issue of stray cows. Authorities admit there was political pressure, but in the end, the commissioner's word prevailed.Not everyone was willing to change. Singh says there have been instances when municipal employees were threatened, beaten and even killed. They had to hire bouncers to protect their employees. Municipal authorities had to counter conflict within the system, from the traditional nexus between employees, corporators and jagirdars (or ward in-charges). "By then we had so much public support, that no amount of pressure could stop the momentum towards cleanliness," Singh adds.Technology provided handy support to the initiative. Indore's mini-tippers were GPS-fitted so that they could be tracked and monitored, and a helpline app was launched for grievance redressal. The app received 250-300 complaints a day initially and these had to be addressed within 24 hours.Walking on an Indore street no longer means dodging stray cows, garbage piles and vendors plying their wares. Garbage is taken from the house to a transfer station and then to the landfill leaving the main streets clean and dust-free.People living in slums have been rid of the unbearable stench of rotting garbage. And the air is cleaner, with RSPM levels down from 140 micrograms/Nm3 to 90 micrograms/Nm3. The breeding of flies and mosquitoes has declined and so have seasonal diseases. Dr Sanjay Dixit, who heads the community medicine department at government-run Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College and Maharaja Yeshwantrao hospital, says there has been an improvement in public health. Cases of acute gastrointestinal disease came down from 40 admissions in March 2014 to 25 cases in March 2017, while patients admitted for acute respiratory infection - indicating air pollution - declined from 26 in March 2016 to 16 cases in March 2017, he said, adding that out-patient numbers had also seen a drop.Kesarbai, who lives with her five-member family in a two-room tenement at Pancham ke Phael slum colony in the heart of the city, says: "Our children would fall ill frequently. Now illnesses have come down and the area around our homes is so clean. Now if someone tries to throw garbage, I yell at them."In south Indore, in far more plush surroundings, Amit Sharma finds a perceptible difference in Indore's sanitation standards in the last two years. Associate director at PwC, he remembers returning in 2010 after a stint in the UK to a city with dirty, stinking roads. "I would say that there are still a lot of things that need improvement, but we are where we want to go."