Subir Roy: The story of Shuchi Mitra

OFFBEAT

When I first started visiting Bangalore regularly in 2001, I was struck by the cleanliness of most of its roads. Then when I came to live there, I saw the way this was made possible. Roads got swept not just every morning but sometimes at night too.

In my neighbourhood, women dressed in green overalls would ring a bell and collect the garbage from door to door, put it on pushcarts that had different bins into which the garbage would eventually be segregated in a rough and ready manner and maybe around 9 am a truck would come to take away the garbage, minimising the garbage lying on roadside collection points.

This was part of a joint initiative called Swachha Bangalore between the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BMP), the city municipality, and Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), a public-private partnership, to literally clean up the city.

BMP had earlier decided to stop recruiting full time poura karmikas (civic workers) to remove the city's solid waste and get contractors to do the job with hired temporary hands. Then came BATF, which initiated an experiment to get citizens to work for a cleaner city.

The general feeling among the citizenry is that after having become a lot cleaner in the last several years, in the last one year, Bangalore has got dirtier. Garbage is reappearing in neighbourhoods where the residents are not very well organsied. In commercial areas, the situation is sometimes worse.

It is not as if Bangalore has become as dirty as Kolkata used to be. It is still cleaner than most other Indian cities. But it has lost a chance to be exceptional and set the pace for others. That would have been so if Swachha Bangalore had continued, not just on paper but effectively, and more importantly, if Shuchi Mitra had survived.

Swachha Bangalore sought to make the city garbage free, the neighbourhood roads dustbin free and festering garbage collection points non-existent. Door-to-door collection of garbage was initiated and the process timed with the arrival of garbage trucks that took the stuff away promptly. A key element in the synchronisation and supervision needed was the institution and the Shuchi Mitra.

This was a volunteer, mostly a woman, in a neighbourhood, who was the focal point of community participation in door-to-door garbage collection, through daily monitoring. It rested on team work between the citizen and the health department of BMP and led to greater rapport between officialdom and citizenry and ended up recognising that voluntary service had an integral role to play in making a city livable.

At one stage, the number of Shuchi Mitras went into high three figures. They maintained a daily logbook (to record whether the poura karmikas arrived on time and did their work, whether the garbage trucks arrived on time), filed feedback reports, a complaint register and minutes of meetings with civic officials.

They supervised the cleaning process, coordinated with the neighbourhood to identify the trouble spots, and educated fellow citizens on the way to segregate garbage. The Shuchi Mitra served entirely voluntarily, was selected to work on a temporary capacity, her work was reviewed every three months.

The system worked. Results of periodic reviews revealed by the report cards prepared by the well-known NGO Public Affairs Centre showed that BMP's work was improving. Garbage was cleared more regularly from doorsteps and 60 per cent of garbage "black spots" and community bins were gone.

Footnote: When the present state government came to power, BATF ceased to function and was even derided by some politicians. Needless to add, the Shuchi Mitra also ceased to exist.