Surge in tourism in the Himalayas has led to enormous plastic waste generation, adversely affecting the region’s environment and wildlife. Vishal Kumar, CEO, Waste Warriors, discusses how this problem can be addressed.
Vishal Kumar: It is huge. Tourism has boomed phenomenally in the region over the last few years. More new tourist destinations and stay options have sprung up across the region. They are not concentrated in one spot. This has brought changes to the local consumption patterns.
The waste collected from these places is mostly dumped on the hillsides. During monsoons the garbage flows into rivers and forest areas. Wild animals have increasingly started coming close to the human settlements because of dumping of waste in the open. There is enough documented evidence of this. There is also now evidence emerging of plastic being found in elephant dung in the region.
Vishal Kumar: We are trying to bring systemic changes through four primary objectives. First, enabling better governance of waste management. It is the local government’s job to offer waste management services. Our job is to enable them to do their job better.
Second, we want to empower communities to take environmental action and co-create solutions with us. This includes villagers, students, tourists, business owners, and tour and taxi operators.
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Our third objective is to promote local entrepreneurship. Creating systemic solutions opens doors for value creation from waste operations. So that value needs to be captured by the local communities instead of us bringing in someone from a big city. For waste management units we try to find local entrepreneurs and empower them to manage the facilities.
Finally, we also address specific research and policy gaps with respect to waste management in the Himalayan region.
Vishal Kumar: Waste Warriors started in a unique way. We were founded by a British traveller, Jodie Underhill, who came to Dharamshala to work with some Tibetan children.
On her way to the famous Triund trek, she was appalled by the amount of trash she saw, and decided to start a volunteer driven, clean-up focused organisation. She organised clean-up drives with the help of local communities and tourists every week. This continued for 7-8 years without any disruption till the Covid-19 pandemic stuck. Jodie ran the organisation for about five years after which she had to move back to the United Kingdom for personal reasons.
I joined the organisation over two years back. We celebrated our 10th anniversary in November last year. Now we have about 170 people working with us at 10 locations across Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
Vishal Kumar: We have a Paryavaran Sakhi model operational in villages around wildlife sanctuaries and tourist areas.
For example, none of the villages situated on the outskirts of Jim Corbett National Park have access to waste collection services. On the main stretch where hotels are located, a contractor collects non-segregated mixed waste and dumps it in the forest.
We work in about 10 gram panchayats with almost 4,000 households. None of these households had any waste collection facility when we started our project. We started engaging with the gram panchayats. We sat in the gram sabha meetings and got them to pass resolutions on waste management.
We also do a lot of door-to-door engagements with the local residents, telling them about the importance of waste management and the harm of burning waste on the environment and agriculture. We got them to start segregating waste and storing dry waste.
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During the community meetings we identify women who are interested in becoming ‘paryavaran sakhis’. We provide them battery-operated vehicles, and train them in waste collection and gathering user fees. We also give them access to a waste bank through the gram panchayat.
These women collect the waste and bring it to the waste bank. They are also trained to segregate the dry waste and sell it to the local scrap dealers and earn an income from that. There are 25-30 women engaged in this initiative only in the Corbett region. An interesting aspect of this model is that more than half of them are upper caste women. Kamlesh Tiwari was one of the first women who learned how to drive the e-vehicle. Some of them even hold postgraduate degrees. This truly shows how the model is driven by the community.
Our goal over the long term is to make them financially independent. While our focus is dry waste management right now, we want to enable wet waste and e-waste management too.
Vishal Kumar: Let’s take the example of the Swachh Bharat Mission – Gramin, which allocates Rs 16 lakh per block for setting up waste processing facilities.There is no provision for operationalising and maintaining it, or for providing plumbing and electricity in the unit.
Our role is to align a lot of these efforts. While all six blocks in Dehradun received Rs 16 lakh, only one block, where we are working, was able to build the facility. All other blocks had to return the funds because they did not get access to land. No village wants to give lands to the gram panchayat because those establishments are called waste dumping points (instead of waste processing units). The communities usually protest against such sites alleging that the waste generated in other regions will be dumped in their village.
We have had to overcome objections from the community at every place where we have set up these facilities. They even broke our vehicle once. Our work is to overcome these apprehensions on behalf of the gram panchayat. So we do all the legwork on the government’s behalf.
Besides the government funds we also encourage building bigger, functional sheds by putting some capital from our end. Everyone loves to use the word convergence, but operationalising it is truly a big challenge.
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The lead image shows a team from Waste Warriors undertakes a clean-up drive on the Triund trek route in Dharamshala (Photo by Waste Warriors)
