Jabalpur shows the way with its smart system of solid waste management

Smelly rubbish tips, overflowing garbage vats and festering landfills are a blot on the face of many Indian cities. That’s not the case in Jabalpur, though. The third largest city of Madhya Pradesh has made huge strides in making the entire process of garbage collection and disposal smart and technologically-driven, thereby making itself cleaner and greener. 

As the day breaks in Jabalpur, thousands of municipal sanitation workers hit the streets, visiting the lanes, by-lanes and every household. Apart from the usual carts and brooms, they also carry hand-held RFID (radio frequency identification) readers. As they collect the garbage bins, they scan the RFID tags pasted on the wall of each household. The data is instantly transmitted to the command and control centre located miles away and through it, to their supervising authorities. This ensures that no household remains unattended. 

The garbage collected is then taken to the over 300 community bins, including around 50 semi-underground bins which are fitted with sensors. As the garbage piles up and the bins are filled beyond 90 per cent of their capacity, they send out automated alert messages to the authorities as well as the command centre to get them emptied. 

The command and control centre immediately alerts the garbage collection trucks or tippers closest to the place where the community bin is located. The 240-odd tippers engaged by the municipal corporation of Jabalpur have all been fitted with GPS (global positioning system) devices. This not only helps in communication, but also in route optimisation as these vehicles now do not need to go to areas where there is not enough waste to be collected. 

Puneet Gupta, senior vice-president and head of India sales at Tech Mahindra, which was a system integration partner for the project that was responsible for the deployment of RFID technology as well the sensors in the bins, points to the multiple benefits of this system. “You are able to better manage and control the sanitation workers as the 276,000 RFID tags installed at every household tells you if they have visited it and collected the bins or not. You can also save on costs because the trucks don’t have to go to every community bin to check if it is full. Now they go only when they get the automated message from bins that are filled,” he says. 

The tippers carry the garbage to the segregation sites and from there to the waste-to-energy plant which has been set up over 65 acres of land in Kathonda village on the outskirts of the city. The plant, which has a capacity of processing around 600 metric tonnes of waste a day, produces around 11.5 MW of electricity daily. The energy produced is enough for 18,000 households every day and amounts to a reduction of approximately 37,000 tonnes of carbon emissions in the city.

Jabalpur, one of the cities under the Government of India’s Smart Cities Mission, has around 79 wards, 276,000 households and a population of 1.5 million. Though it is less high profile and tech-savvy than cities like Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru, it is way ahead of others in terms of leveraging technologies like Internet of Things, big data and analytics for garbage management. Though some other cities have started tracking garbage management under the smart city project, Jabalpur is the first city in the country to implement end-to-end smart garbage management and disposal system on such a large scale.

Its success in smart waste management has ignited the interest of other states.  “In the last five months, I have received no less than three ministerial visits from states in north and south India. Civic officials from other cities keep coming and try to learn from our experience,” says Chandramauli Shukla, commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Jabalpur.

After its success in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh is now planning to implement the smart waste management system in the entire state. Indore and Bhopal are already in the process of rolling it out. out.

The idea for Jabalpur’s smart waste collection and disposal system was mooted a couple of years ago when the city decided to set up a waste-to-energy plant. The plant, which operates in a public private partnership (PPP) model with the Essel Group, had a capacity to process 600 metric tonnes of solid waste. The civic authorities soon realised that there was not enough waste for processing even though the city was overflowing with stinking garbage.

It was an interesting problem, says Shukla, who is also executive director at Jabalpur Smart City, which is in charge of implementing all smart city-related initiatives. “That is one of the reasons the municipal corporation started an intensive door-to-door collection drive so they could collect at least 450 to 500 metric tonnes of waste every day using technology.”

The project, which started in January last year went live in March this year. “There are a lot of smart city projects going on in India, but the way the garbage management system got implemented in Jabalpur is pretty unique,” adds Gupta of Tech Mahindra, which is also helping other state governments with their smart city initiatives.

While it may be too early to look at the return on investment, officials reveal that the waste-to-energy plant generates electricity worth around Rs 25 million to Rs 30 million in a month. This translates into electricity worth about Rs 300-Rs 350 million in a year. As per the agreement, Essel Group, which is now running the plant, will hand over the plant to the government after 15 years.

“Other than the electricity it generates, the smart garbage management project has managed to address a basic problem that households face in any city. Earlier, since residents didn’t know when their garbage would be collected, they used to throw rubbish at public places or into drains. After we ensured door-to-door collection, we don’t have spilling garbage piles anymore,” says Gajendra Singh Nagesh, additional commissioner and CEO of Jabalpur Smart City.

Cleaning it up

• Area under the Municipal Corporation of Jabalpur 79 wards, 276,000 households, 1.5 million population
• Covered under the smart city project

Technologies at play

• RFID tags are installed at 276,000 households
• Municipal sanitation workers are equipped with RFID readers
• Sanitation workers scan the RFID tags after garbage collection
• This ensures that collection is done from each house 300+ community bins/ semi-underground bins have been fitted with sensors
• Bins send automated message once they are filled beyond a limit
• 240 tippers engaged in garbage collection have GPS devices
• Centralised command & control system monitors waste collection and transfer
• Waste-to-energy plant, with a capacity to process 600 metric tonnes, generates 11.5 MW of electricity a day, sufficient to power 18,000 households