The segregation of waste at the household level is a crucial step in efficient management of solid waste in cities, involving a shift in behaviours and norms. In this post, Oliver Harman examines what has typically worked well and what has often backfired in the context of waste reforms in India.

From solid waste management research, a puzzle emerged: In one Delhi neighbourhood, a light-touch “sensitisation” drive with two bins, a bilingual brochure, and a token incentive  lifted household segregation from 4% to 54% in a single week. If behaviour can shift that fast, why is it so hard to lock gains in across a whole city?

The short answer is that Indian cities are successful when they make the right behaviours easy, visible, and worth sticking with; yet they falter when they ask citizens to do difficult things before the public system itself is reliable. The longer answer is about patterns: what has typically worked, and what has often backfired, in the Indian context.

Successful principles

Make compliance easy

Where storage and collection are physically convenient, citizens follow the rules. In planned settlements, this often looks like household storage with predictable kerbside pickup. In dense bastis and mixed-use wards, well-sited communal points, when paired with dependable collection, reduce the walking time to a legal option and cut roadside dumping. Indian and international experience shows that as cities grow and landfills move outward, transfer stations become the quiet workhorses that shorten haul distances and smooth fleet utilisation, while a mixed fleet (small carts for gullies; larger trucks for arterials) pushes coverage into hard-to-reach lanes. None of this is glamorous, but it lowers the transaction costs of doing the right thing.

Show up predictably

A timetable that residents can set their week by, rather than erratic arrivals, builds reciprocity. People separate garbage when they believe the city will collect what they separate, and that belief is formed by regularity more than by slogans. Predictability is repeatedly flagged as a quiet driver of compliance in the evidence base.

Communicate until it feels normal

The Delhi one-week surge is not unique; Patna saw segregation rates more than double six months after residents were trained and guided; and Indore has treated communication as a permanent public service, saturating streets, schools and media with simple rules and pride-based cues. This drumbeat of information and visibility nudges behaviour from “one more task” to “what people like us do here”. Importantly, successful Indian campaigns paired messages with service that citizens could see, touch, and trust. Some estimates suggest that when education and awareness programmes work well together, total municipal solid waste management (SWM) costs can fall by as much as 40% through less contamination, smoother routing, and higher willingness to pay.

Work with the system you already have

India’s informal collectors and waste pickers provide last-mile access and low-cost recovery in neighbourhoods where formal routes struggle. Where cities have recognised and organised this capacity, for example, Pune’s engagement with the waste-pickers’ union, coverage improved and livelihoods strengthened, usually at lower fiscal cost than building a duplicative apparatus from scratch. The pattern is consistent: registration, personal protecting equipment (PPE), route coordination, and the right to sell recyclables turn a friction point into an asset.

Keep the price signal simple until trust is earned

Indian municipalities face real cost-recovery pressures (waste can absorb around a fifth of operating budgets in developing-country cities), but new fees travel farther when people can see what they are paying for. In lower-capacity settings, bundling waste into an existing bill or levying a modest flat charge tends to protect compliance, this is because there is no marginal penalty for “doing it right”, while still making costs visible. More sophisticated tariffs can come later, once monitoring and billing actually work.

Common obstacles

Complexity before capacity is the common failure mode

Pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) and steeper gate fees can, in principle, reduce residual waste. In practice, where monitoring is thin and trust is fragile, they often send waste out of the formal system, onto pavements, into drains, or to informal dumps. This is precisely because the cheapest option becomes dumping. Evidence from comparable cities shows that high gate fees without credible enforcement lead small hauliers to avoid official sites (sometimes simply to dodge queues), while PAYT schemes demand administrative and social infrastructure that many municipalities do not yet have.

Technology ahead of feedstock tends to disappoint

Incineration and waste-to-energy can look tidy on a slide deck, but unit costs are typically far higher than recycling, and plants that must stay “fed” can crowd out recovery. Composting or anaerobic digestion can be strong fits for Indian organics, but only if segregation is real and throughput is reliable. The cases that succeed match the kit to the material and the operator capability; the ones that fail ask machines to solve a compliance problem.

Contracting without teeth is another repeat offender

Public-private partnerships (PPP) bring capital and discipline when risks are well-allocated and performance is tightly specified. Where responsibilities are vague, or where cities lack the capacity to monitor, incentives drift toward cost-cutting, coverage skews in favour of lucrative areas, and lock-ins become expensive to unwind. The lesson from misfiring waste PPPs elsewhere is relevant in India: structure for equity and verifiability up front, or the partnership will pursue its own logic.

Skipping the social contract

Citizens notice when rules are enforced on them while service is intermittent, or when segregated waste is mixed later in the chain. In those conditions, awareness campaigns look like lectures, not invitations. The cities that have moved the needle, again here Indore is illustrative, paired visible municipal effort with simple, repeated messaging and community leadership, turning cleanliness from a compliance exercise into a local norm.

So what does the puzzle teach us?

The Delhi “4-to-54” week shows how quickly households respond when the ask is clear and the system makes sense around them. Scaled up, the pattern is pragmatic: get the basics close and predictable; normalise the behaviour with communication citizens can see working; use the capacity that already exists in informal networks; and only then layer pricing and technology that depend on high-trust compliance. When Indian cities follow that arc, the formal system becomes the path of least resistance. When they invert it, leakage follows.

Throughout UN-Habitat's Urban October, IGC showcased some of the solutions for sustainable growth in cities. Read the Cities that Work flagship synthesis paper on policy options for improved solid waste management.

The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the I4I Editorial Board.