According to a study titled Plastic STORI: Study of Rural India, released by non-profit Pratham Education Foundation, most Indian villages do not have any waste management infrastructure.
The report recorded public waste bins in only 36 per cent of the 700 villages across 15 states. Just 29 per cent had a community waste collection vehicle, while less than half the villages had access to a sanitation worker or safai karamchari. Due to the lack of formal infrastructure, 90 per cent of the villages primarily depended on informal waste collectors or kabadiwalas, the study said.
The kabadiwalas visited villages at least once in a week. But they did not accept all kinds of waste and were very selective about it. Waste such as paper, metal and cardboard was readily collected by them but single-use plastics such as wrappers, sachets and plastic packaging were rejected, the study found. Such single-use, low-quality plastics were contributing to the growing waste problem in rural India, the report highlighted.
This would worsen further since there was a pronounced lack of mitigation systems to address the growing waste problem, the study said. In addition, the lack of awareness among the rural population further posed a serious threat to the well-being of rural India, it noted.
Some 67 per cent of over 8,400 rural household preferred to burn plastic waste not bought by kabadiwalas. Nearly three-fourths of the households burning waste were unaware about the ill-effects of burning plastic waste.
The report also revealed that very few villages received funds for awareness raising on plastic waste management. The study indicates that unless action is taken, over 0.6 million villages will become distributed islands of trash.
The study has called for segregation of waste at source. It has also urged companies to come forward to set up or support a system for picking up the segregated waste and sending it to appropriate destinations. “Relying on an informal scrap dealer system is not going to be enough for managing waste in villages,” said Kedar Sohoni, founder of non-profit Green Communities Foundation (GCF). “Those brands who are putting material like hard-to-recycle multilayer plastic into the market, need to support costs involved in setting up and running a reverse logistics system. This is the biggest gap as on date, since the current market rates do not support collection and transportation of low value plastic from the villages,” he was quoted in the study.