Opinion Fire in Kochi garbage mound: The solid waste crisis in Kerala is social, political – and profoundly cultural

The acute impact of deteriorating air quality in Kochi-Ernakulam and adjacent districts like Alappuzha and Thrissur rightly brought the state’s collective gaze to Kochi Corporation’s management of the waste processing facility at Brahmapuram. However, people living in the periphery of major urban centres in the state have been bearing the brunt of woeful solid waste management. Along with the smouldering of small fires that vitiate air quality, the leachate from the mixed waste has chronically polluted ground and surface water sources used by these communities. Kochi Corporation admitted, in 2016, that the leachate from the Brahmapuram site has been contaminating the Kadambrayar river as well as the groundwater in its vicinity. It can be safely assumed that, in the aftermath of the fire, water used for dousing the flames, laden with leachate and toxic substances, will add to that contaminant load.

The major economic, social, and health externalities — plummeting real estate value, the reluctance of women to marry men from these places and the prevalence of adverse health outcomes — in the periphery of almost all major towns in Kerala have been widely documented. The phenomenon of urban towns exporting their poorly-managed waste (and its negative externalities) to its peripheries needs to be first recognised to be able to begin an informed debate on the possible institutional mechanisms for addressing this issue.

The soundbites provided by the Opposition in Kerala on this issue have been predictably unimaginative. Corruption, flawed institutional practices in hiring private sector service providers, and administrative apathy have been widely quoted in media accounts. While these are legitimate concerns, a deeper reading of these arguments points to a rather widely prevalent attitude towards solid waste management in the state, especially among the constituents of the state’s governing class — of technology as a “magic wand” in addressing the issue. Experience in the sector across the world has shown that technology can only be effective if the issues related to backward linkages (especially segregation of different types of solid waste) are addressed. As far as policy levers for improving backward linkages, the most conspicuous attribute that grabs the attention of policymakers is the behaviour (and patterns of consumption) of domestic-waste generators. However, this also remains the most intractable element in evolving an effective Solid Waste Management regime. With regard to that, a waste-to-energy treatment plant is in the works in Brahmapuram, which is expected to be operational in two years. While these have found favour in other parts of the world, they are unlikely to succeed if the character of municipal solid waste is mixed, containing both organic and inorganic materials.

The failure of centralised treatment facilities in the state is directly attributable to the fact that the waste generators are merely conceived as consumers rather than responsible members of the community, shaping local governance. It is also relevant to observe that such an approach — with technology at its core — comes loaded with financial incentives for various stakeholders, including the political class, private sector and the bureaucracy.

The ineffective (and unjust) character of centralised technocratic approaches to solid waste management has been highlighted by communities from across Kerala for the last three decades. Protests and legal challenges initiated demonstrate how the existing waste management approach effectively renders them recipients of waste generated in bigger urban centres with all the negative externalities that come with it.

The failure of centralised approaches is also actively shaping people’s attitudes to setting up liquid waste management infrastructure across the state. With less than 5 per cent of the state’s population connected to the sanitation grid, Kerala is struggling to expand sanitation service provision primarily due to protests against siting of sanitation infrastructure from local communities. The state-wide protests against the mishandling of solid waste management facilities have resulted in a near-complete breakdown in trust between the administration and the citizens, adversely affecting the former’s ability to identify sites for establishing liquid waste management treatment units across Kerala.

Kerala’s current strategy of locating waste processing facilities in the periphery of urban centres stems directly from the powerful position enjoyed by economically predominant urban centres over regions in its periphery. However, without the supply of natural and human resources from the peripheries, urban centres would cease to be functional. The symbiotic nature of the relationship needs to be acknowledged by the bigger urban centres to ensure that peripheries do not become waste sinks. While unremitting protests from affected communities made cities like Thiruvananthapuram and Alappuzha recognise the limits to technocratic managing, the use of old-fashioned law enforcement levers has allowed Kochi-Ernakulam to continue dumping unsegregated solid waste at the Brahmapuram site. The current flare-up of the mound is an opportune moment to recognise that wishing it away by burying it unprocessed will eventually have widespread effects beyond the immediate vicinity of the dump yard site.

The way forward includes adopting a place-based planning approach which considers the spatial and temporal variability in the character of both solid and liquid waste streams in a location and evolving mechanisms for recovering and reusing nutrients. More importantly, large urban centres need to adopt decentralised institutional mechanisms that allow them to manage solid waste within their administrative jurisdiction, to the extent possible, which reduces the quantum of waste (and improves its quality) reaching the centralised processing facility. Beyond the political and social dimensions, the waste crisis in Kerala is also a profoundly cultural one. The contemporary global waste management discourse has come to revolve around the idea of a circular economy of waste. However, the depersonalised character of the term only serves to legitimise unfettered consumption and implicitly exonerates the individual citizen in the process. Genuine citizen-driven waste governance is a non-starter without critical engagement with the moral dimensions of modern consumption at the collective level.

Ganapathy is a research fellow at Ashank Desai Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay. Pillai is a research scholar at the Centre for Technology Alternatives for Rural Areas (CTARA), IIT Bombay