ABSTRACT
Introduction In the present decade the urban population of less developed countries (LDCs) have been growing at a remarkable pace. During 2000-05, the average growth rate of the urban population in low income countries was more than twice that of middle income countries and more than three times the figure for high income countries (WDR 2009). One important consequence of the increase in urban population is the rise in urban waste level as well as per capita waste generation owing to concomitant improvement in living standards. Unless properly managed, the burgeoning volume of this waste can impose significant health and aesthetic costs on the city populace. Recognition of these social costs led to the enunciation of environmentally safer norms of disposal and collection. The common thrust of these new initiatives is to arrange for alternative end uses of waste that would prolong the life of landfill sites. The process of reforming waste management practices was also associated with changes in the institutional delivery mechanism of garbage disposal services. In developed countries, these institutional reforms were seen in the form of contracted out refuse collection and privately operated landfills.1 Further, stakeholders like households and industry were linked up within the waste collection and disposal chain through economic instruments like user-charges and advance disposal fees. Such a market integrated institutional delivery mechanism, however, is unlikely to work for less developed areas. This is because waste collection and disposal are still non-market activities in this part of the world, and whatever markets exist for the collection of recyclables are informal in nature. Hence, an important agenda for civic authorities in developing countries is to arrive at a proper institutional set up that would sustain the reforms sought by waste management policies. This conundrum of institutional set up in developing regions can be illustrated by the waste management scenarios in the urban agglomerates in India. Irregular collection of urban waste and its improper disposal in open spaces were one of the major environmental problems in Indian cities. Recognition of the social costs associated with such practices led to the promulgation of the Municipal Solid Waste Management and Handling (MSWMH) Rules (2000) that
formulated the best practices of waste collection and disposal for the local bodies in India. The municipal bodies were asked to introduce doorstep collection of segregated waste and replace open dumps by sanitary landfills. Particular emphasis was also laid on the adoption of alternate disposal practices like composting and biomethanation2 that would divert waste from landfills and delay the capacity exhaustion for an economically meaningful time horizon. This chapter attempts to study the institutional and organizational adjustments that are taking place in India after the issuance of MSWMH Rules (2000) in order to understand the extent of complementarities between environmental policy and institutional reform. To prepare the setting, the following section discusses the trend in waste generation and disposal for developed and developing countries. The waste related policies and institutional arrangements across the high and low income areas are also compared and discussed here. In the next section the stylized facts of urban waste management in less developed economies are then matched and illustrated for India. The institutional evolution following waste management regulations in India are discussed in the following section and the last section offers the concluding observations.
