Inside the solution to India's waste problem | Brut Documentary

Almost every city in India has one of these. Massive fire broke out at a landfill site in North Delhi. Fire at Kochi's waste treatment plant. Mega city Mumbai is rapidly running out of space to dump garbage. I wanted to find out if there is a solution to the problem of legacy dump sites in India and if there are challenges to that solution. And all the studies and searches led me to Indore. This commercial capital of the central state of Madhya Pradesh has been adjudged the cleanest city in India for the last six years. But we came back with more questions than answers. The Indore government says, their robust system of source segregation has been the game changer for the city. We got exclusive permission to have a first-hand experience on how waste is collected, segregated and processed in the city. A government representative was assigned to accompany us at all times during the shoot. This is used for our garden. What was the changing factor? There are a total of 10 transportation stations in Indore. The car comes here first, and then it goes to the weighing station. What is this? This is a diaper. What? Diaper. Diaper? Yes. You are taking it out with your hands, don't you feel like doing it? I don't feel like doing it. What? I don't feel like doing it. You never feel like doing it? Have you gotten used to it? I have gotten used to it, ma'am. I don't feel like doing it. From these transport stations, the waste goes for processing. On a patch of land which was earlier part of their main dump site, the Indore government has set up two plants, one for recycling plastic and another to produce bio-CNG from wet waste. Before NEPRA, NEPRA was not a big dredging ground. Yes. It was a very big dredging ground. There were a lot of area workers here who used to work on this dredging ground to run their houses. NEPRA has basically given all these female workers or all the employment to NEPRA. All of them are given their own tasks. You will recover the flour pouch, you will repair the milk pouch, you will pick up the mixed plastic, you will pick up the head quarters. A lot has changed. Earlier, we used to work in wet, dry, rain, everything. Earlier, we used to pick up the sacks. This biogas plant in Indore is touted to be Asia's largest. During its inauguration, PM's office promised that 75 municipalities across India are slated to get such bio-CNG plants over the next two years. The renewable fuel from segregated wet waste is used to run city buses. One more thing is that the CO2 that is coming out, we are setting up a recovery unit for it. For the waste that cannot be processed or recycled, the final destination in an ideal waste management system is the scientific landfill. Devgudadia on the edge of the city used to be a 100-acre open dump site and a ground for dumping all sorts of mixed waste. The land was reportedly reclaimed through a scientific process of legacy waste removal in 2018. A part of the dump site has now been turned into a garden. A part has been utilized for setting up the processing plants and the rest is used as a sanitary landfill or scientific landfill as per the Indore Municipal Corporation. This is where we were restricted from objectively filming. The many attempts to stop me from filming the landfill piqued my curiosity. When our team tried to take drone footage, our camera was forcefully seized without informing the reason. We repeatedly asked the Municipal Commissioner to respond to a query on why our footage was withheld. Before our visit to the landfill, she had told us this. IAS officer and the 2018 Mayor Ashish Singh had claimed he had led the charge of clearing the dump site through a scientific process to free up the land for the city forests and the processing plants. I looked up the Google Earth images since 2018 and we do see a change happening in the dump site area. Unfortunately, since we were not allowed to go inside the landfill or take drone footage, we couldn't point to exactly what the corporation was worried about. So we took our questions and doubts to environmental experts who have been researching Indore's waste management policy for years. From the evidence, from the satellite imagery or the video you have just played, it is very, very difficult to... Apparently, it looked like some drain sills which they have dumped, right? Now, drain sills are again inert, so you can put drain sills, it is... There's no harm. But the ground, whether it is lined or unlined, it's very difficult unless we go and see it for ourselves. But Biswas said questions on landfill shouldn't take away from what Indore has been able to achieve in comparison to other cities. Indore model, economically, financially, environmentally, way better. So they are already in a next level, even if they are putting some inerts here and there, right? I am going to give them that discount considering what they have achieved already, right? They are generating humongous amount of revenue by producing 17 tons of bio-CNG every day. There can be small holes here and there, even in the best practices. When you say best practices, the ideal world should be better practices. While we did find answers to whether there could be a solution to the big waste problem in Indian cities, we couldn't ascertain the sustainability of it. But researchers believe that cities like Indore is a great head start towards progress.