Guwahati, Oct 26: To motivate stakeholders to manage waste at ground level, the Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) has come out with a campaign for handling the mounting garbage to make the city clean and green with enhanced citizen awareness, an official said.
As part of ‘Sikun Guwahati – Mor Guwahati’ (Clean Guwahati – My Guwahati) campaign of GMC, each ward is being assessed on the basis of 10 parameters.
Social scientists and common residents of the city also hailed the move and opined that it has the potential to bring positive changes in society.
Guwahati, the gateway to Northeast India and the largest city of the region, generates around 700 tonnes of waste every day, and almost 300 tonnes of that trash remains untreated, aggravating the problem with each passing day.
“We have launched the ‘Sikun Guwahati – Mor Guwahati’ campaign with an aim to make the city clean and green. It will be done primarily through enhanced citizen awareness, efficient solid waste management and the promotion of urban greenery,” GMC Commissioner M S Lakshmi Priya told PTI.
Under this campaign, monthly ward-level assessments are being conducted to evaluate cleanliness standards and monitor progress across the city, she added.
“The first round of assessments has already been completed, covering all wards on 10 key parameters. We assessed the wards on a 25-day performance,” Priya said.
The GMC evaluated the wards on several criteria like residential areas, commercial zones, public spaces, water bodies, public toilets, educational institutions, tourist locations, parks, bulk waste generators and RRR (reduce, reuse, recycle) centres.
Each ward was assessed by a team of three trained assessors, supervised by sanitary inspectors and junior technical officers, under the guidance of the executive officer of the respective ward.
“To ensure transparency and data-driven monitoring, GMC developed a dedicated ‘Sikun Guwahati Survekshan’ web portal and mobile application. The assessments are conducted digitally using this platform, which features an interactive dashboard modelled on the Swachh Survekshan framework of the Government of India,” Priya said.
An important component of the ‘Sikun Guwahati Survekshan’ is citizen feedback, which plays a vital role in evaluating the overall cleanliness and public satisfaction across wards.
Speaking about the initiative, the GMC Commissioner expressed confidence that the campaign will not only improve on-ground cleanliness and waste management systems, but also foster greater citizen engagement.
“The corporation is committed to achieving a significant improvement in the upcoming Swachh Survekshan 2025 by the central government, building upon the lessons and progress made in previous years,” she added.
The Guwahati city ranked 402 out of 458 Indian cities in 2023 in its category of 1-10 lakh population in Swachh Survekshan survey. This poor performance considerably improved in 2024, when the capital city of Assam jumped to rank 44.
To foster community involvement in the ‘Sikun Guwahati – Mor Guwahati’ campaign, ward-level committees chaired by ward councillors were formed. These committees organised awareness programmes on source segregation, promoting waste separation into four categories — wet, dry, domestic hazardous and sanitary.
Presently, Guwahati generates 600-700 tonnes of municipal solid waste per day. Out of these, only around 417.5 tonnes are processed at different facilities across the city.
Another senior GMC official said several new waste processing units are being set up, and once these are ready, the problem of mounting garbage will be contained to a large extent.
Commenting on the initiative, Handique Girls’ College Assistant Professor (Political Science) Pallavi Deka said the solid waste management system in Guwahati is severely hampered by public unawareness and administrative apathy, especially regarding segregation at source.
“Waste continues to be dumped without sorting, and initiatives like ‘Sikun Guwahati’ have the potential to make positive changes, provided it is implemented with proper planning and intent. However, such initiatives were lacking in the past, limiting their effectiveness,” she added.
The social commentator further said that in commercial areas, the absence of designated waste disposal points leads to drain blockages and waterlogging, especially during the monsoon season.
“Over-reliance on landfilling has caused serious environmental and health hazards. Critically, Deepor Beel, a Ramsar site, faces ecological degradation due to nearby waste dumping,” she added.
Deka said that a shift towards decentralised waste management with strict enforcement, community participation and sustainable practices is essential to address these growing challenges.
The residents of the city are also appreciating the GMC’s plans to engage all stakeholders to mitigate the perennial crisis of waste management.
“This is a very good initiative by the local civic body. We have been facing the waste problem for a long time. There were other programmes earlier too, but those were not very effective in handling the crisis. The fact that the civic body has realised the lacunae and started this new initiative gives us hope,” senior journalist Bidisha Singha, a resident of Ward No 34, said.
Likewise, Hiranya Sarma from Ward No 57 said that earlier waste was not collected regularly and it used to decompose on the roads itself, but many of his neighbours are segregating the waste nowadays after they attended a few meetings, organised by GMC officials.
“Because of the proactive nature of the people, the entire locality’s overall cleanliness has improved considerably. We have now decided to continue work like this for our ward in the future too, irrespective of the competition,” he added. (PTI)
