Empowering the informal sector in urban waste management: Towards a comprehensive waste management policy for India

Abstract

The informal sector plays a vital role in waste management in urban areas of developing countries, such as India, offering financially sustainable and employment-generating solutions. The sector's significance, however, is often overlooked. While some policies and laws do acknowledge the informal sector, the lack of precise guidance leads to poor implementation. This paper emphasizes the need to empower the informal sector by recognizing its contributions, understanding its challenges, and implementing measures to support it.Through subjective analysis and expert interactions, the paper offers recommendations for existing policies and proposes a basic framework for a new Comprehensive Waste Management Policy (CWMP). The proposed policy highlights five key attributes: training, integration at the community level, inclusion of informal sector, data-driven decision making, and regular review mechanisms to achieve sustainable and effective waste management. A typical multi-criteria decision-making approach, called TOPSIS (technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution), is then used to rank these attributes. These recommendations and the proposed policy framework offer an initial step for data-driven basis for sustainable waste management, which is environment friendly, financially efficient, and upholds human dignity.