A visit to the city’s Kumbarakoppal ward is a useful starting point in understanding how this city remains so enviably clean. The ward, home to a waste-sorting site called a “zero waste management unit,” sells 95 percent of its garbage. Just 5 percent goes into landfills.

Kumbarakoppal means “the potters’ colony”. Long ago, most residents in this area were potters. Today, the ward offers valuable lessons on how to re-imagine trash. The waste management plant is run by a local NGO, the Federation of Mysuru City Corporation Wards Parliament. Every imaginable bit of trash comes here: footwear, milk cartons, beer bottles, plastic, used deodorants. They are neatly segregated into 35 categories, labelled, and sold to scrap merchants who sell it to recyclers and industries that can reuse the material. Nothing goes to waste — not even bottle caps. Organic waste is sold to farmers for use as fertilizer.

Set up in 2012, Kumbarakoppal was the first zero-waste management unit in Mysuru. Today, the city has nine such centers that can handle trash from nearly half of Mysruru’s 65 wards. Another 47 scattered smaller centers handle only dry waste.  

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C G Betsurmath, who until recently led the local government as Commissioner of the Mysuru City Corporation, says Mysuru became India’s cleanest city because it practiced the “4 Rs”: reduce, reuse, recycle and refuse — those who collect trash from homes won’t collect it unless it is segregated.

This has helped the city to monetize the waste it generates. The Corporation also runs a compost plant in partnership with a private company; the Corporation gets a royalty payment from the company that operates the plant, Betsurmath says.

Betsurmath is proud of what he and his predecessors have achieved. Mysuru has 100 percent door-to-door collection of trash; 80 percent is segregated before being processed; 98 percent of Mysuru’s network of drains are covered and the drains are regularly cleaned and maintained by the Corporation. Every house in Mysuru has a toilet and the toilets have water connections, so Mysuru is nearly free of open defecation. (By contrast, a recent study found that 52 percent of rural Indians and 7.5 percent of urban dwellers defecate in the open.)

Much of this was in place before Modi’s Swachh Bharat program, but that campaign and the clean-city contests have helped galvanize the local authorities, strengthen existing initiatives and put in place additional measures. Plans have been drawn up for two new compost plants. In addition, 425 toilets were identified for repairs and funds were sanctioned to do the work; plans are being drawn up to construct even more public toilets in commercial centers.

“We have a team of health inspectors, drain inspectors, environmental engineers,” says Dr. D G Nagaraj, the Municipal Corporation’s health officer. “Each sweeper is allotted his or her specific cleaning tasks. Some do sweeping, some door-to-door collection, some deal with complaints and grievances. Health inspectors and supervisors do random visits. Every morning, attendance of corporation employees as well as contractual workers is checked. Anyone found wanting has penalties deducted from their salary.”

“It is not just technology,” says Betsurmath. “It is also one-to-one conversations. We had digital displays of messages on segregation, keeping the city clean, about Mysuru being the cleanest city and so on. We worked a lot on advocacy.”