The Supreme Court on August 4 directed the Union government to create comprehensive guidelines to impose and collect environmental compensation for violations of the Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules, 2026.
But, as the bench of justices P S Narasimha and Alok Aradhe noted, the institutionalisation of solid waste management requires not only robust laws but also effective regulatory mechanisms and accountability to ensure their implementation.
This has been a challenge in India. Here’s a look at India’s mounting waste problem, and how it can be tackled.
What is the typical journey of waste in India – from doorstep to landfills?
A household is supposed to hand over segregated waste at the door. It moves to a primary collection point, then a secondary storage or transfer station, and on to processing. Wet waste should go for composting or biogas generation; dry waste to a material recovery facility for sorting and, thereon, to respective recycling or recovery units; sanitary waste for safe disposal; and special-care items like paint cans, bulbs and old medicines to designated centres. Only inert residue that cannot be recovered is meant to reach a sanitary landfill.
How seamless is this waste journey?
In most parts of the country, the system breaks down at several points. While municipalities report more than 95% collection efficiency, that might not be the case with rural jurisdictions. The collected waste is, more often than not, unsegregated. Even if segregated at source, waste is often tipped into a vehicle with a single compartment, or consolidated at a transfer station with everything else, and arrives at the other end as one mixed load.
And once mixed, it is largely unusable: compost plants cannot take contaminated organics, and recyclers will not buy soiled paper or plastic. There remains no avenue for this waste but to be disposed of into dumpsites.
How has India’s waste policy evolved?
The country passed the first-ever Municipal Solid Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000 — that’s 25 years ago. It’s also been a decade since India’s revised SWM Rules, 2016. The 2016 rules had the right intentions, but on critical issues such as waste segregation and landfills, the rules lacked bite. Implementation remained a problem.
This subsequently led to India’s environment ministry notifying the new SWM rules of 2026 on January 27, superseding the 2016 rules.
Noting the progress and limitations of the 2016 rules, the 2026 rules were introduced to improve segregation, curb landfill dependency and take forward the principles of a “circular economy”. The new rules require four-stream segregation, a national monitoring portal, greater responsibility for bulk waste generators and time-bound action on legacy dumpsites.
Children play on a mound of construction waste and garbage resembling a landfill at Shastri Park in Delhi. Tashi Tobgyal
What major challenge ails India’s waste sector despite rules being in place?
India’s waste crisis has not been for want of rules. It has been the haphazard implementation of those rules. A plant is built or a dumpsite cleared before the basics are answered. Is the waste still segregated when it reaches a facility? Can a city’s waste data be trusted? Is there a market for what is recovered?
Regulators and implementers need to act effectively, and in the right sequential manner: segregate first, verify next, build later. These must form the foundations of the waste sector.
What’s the first step for the waste sector to ensure effective implementation?
Quality segregation is the critical first step. There is enough visible infrastructure by way of waste processing facilities. But it’s imperative to ensure the waste is clean and segregated appropriately before it reaches these facilities. If it isn’t, then it compounds a problem afflicting the broader system right now — data integrity and the lack of trustworthy evidence from the last mile.
For instance, does the waste reported at each stage actually add up? Weighbridges can help assess this at transfer stations, processing facilities and landfills. They should be mandatory, but not all facilities ensure this in reality. Moreover, because mixed waste releases methane in dumpsites and open burning fouls the air, cleaner segregation is also a win for the climate and public health.
What other best-practices ensure better implementation?
The focus must be on thorough data verification. Right now, decisions are not based on scientific evidence and reported waste data may not be reliable. To properly resolve this, and to ensure data integrity of the sector overall, the following factors must be addressed:
Local bodies implement complex rules without enough trained staff, stable financing or technical knowledge. A plant built to deal with one kind of waste inevitably fails when segregation improves in the waste management chain and it has to handle a different kind of waste.
Under compliance pressure, tech solutions are adopted before the necessary groundwork is done: of studying waste, planning ward by ward and finally testing whether a viable market exists.
For instance, the Okhla compost plant in Delhi is capable of producing output (in the form of compost/biofertiliser) of around 200 tonnes per day. But it is reported, as per 2018 data, to be producing 40 tonnes per day due to low demand. This is because in that immediate region, the demand in the market is likely for a different kind of waste output. Therefore, tech solutions must be aligned with the waste profile — and market viability — of a particular jurisdiction. All this entails quality data.
But because these numbers meant to guide decision-making at every stage are largely self-reported and rarely verified, poor implementation is the result. This is why it’s essential to make third-party audits routine for data verification.
What can be done to deter misgovernance?
It’s essential to ensure punitive provisions for deliberate misreporting of data and consequent misgovernance. There must be real consequences for tarnishing data integrity. Because a central waste portal is only as good as the data fed into it from diverse geographies. If unverified numbers are constantly digitised, our implementation will naturally fail.
India already suffers from this pattern: cities report high collection and processing even as dumpsites grow and waste stays mixed. The national auditor, the CAG, repeatedly finds weak segregation, collection and processing — whereas official databases show otherwise. This makes verification crucial.
How do we optimally use quality, verified data from the waste sector?
India already has the capacity for efficient digital public infrastructure (DPI), and we leverage the same capacity. The national waste portal can support an AI and big data analytics-assisted Decision Support System (DSS) that analyses a city or village’s grassroots data.
A collapsed garbage heap in Pune district’s Pimpri-Chinchwad. Express
It can then point towards a suitable waste management pathway unique to that jurisdiction including suggesting appropriate tech for the region. Essentially this model can help local governments with a tech-suitability matrix. This is a good way to ensure waste management pathways are driven by local evidence – which in turn can result in optimising fiscal decision making.
How significant is the Supreme Court verdict?
The Supreme Court has taken serious cognisance of the issue.
An earlier SC order of February 2026, was blunt: “The legislature has done its job, and it is now for the executive and the citizens to implement and follow the mandate laid down by the Parliament… without leaving any time gaps.”
As per the Supreme Court’s directives, a high-level monitoring committee was set up, tasked with ensuring appropriate implementation of the SWM Rules. The committee filed an interim report before the next top court hearing in early August.
As it stands now, the Supreme Court has developed a framework to guide the determination of environmental compensation under the SWM Rules, 2026. It has also directed the Environment Ministry to create comprehensive guidelines for imposing and collecting such compensation. While passing this verdict, the SC bench said that the focus must now move from framing laws to ensuring their strict implementation on the ground.
Akshat Patni is Founder and CEO, Sustainology360, and Senior Advisor, Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development (IGSD), a new-age sustainability think tank focused on delivering integrated solutions in clean air, water, and soil through climate action, environmental compliance, and ESG-driven transformation.
Saloni Srivastava is a Senior Research and Policy Associate for Climate Economics and Finance at Gateway Research (IGSD India), based in New Delhi.
The Okhla landfill site in Delhi. Even if segregated at source, waste is often tipped into a vehicle with a single compartment, or consolidated at a transfer station with everything else, and arrives at the other end as one mixed load. Abhinav Saha 
Children play on a mound of construction waste and garbage resembling a landfill at Shastri Park in Delhi. Tashi Tobgyal
A collapsed garbage heap in 
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