Improving services and improving lives: waste-picker integration and municipal coproduction in Pune, India
Creators: name: Failor, Tamara
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2010

description: This case study focuses on two challenges of the developing world: the provision of effective and sustainable solid waste management services, and the improvement of conditions in the informal sector. Internal and structural issues typically prevent institutions in developing countries from adequately delivering basic services (Joshi, 2008). Such obstacles include corruption, a lack of adequate employee training and incentives, and the decentralization of responsibility to local government without also allocating sufficient authority (Joshi, 2008). This paper broaches both topics by examining the case of an innovative municipal solid waste management solution that integrates the lowest on the informal sector waste management hierarchy into the formal system while substantially improving their incomes and working conditions in enduring ways. Historically, the State has been responsible for the provision of public goods and services. But since the 1980s proponents of market-based reforms have questioned the State's role as sole provider. Calling for a greater involvement of the private sector, they argue that competition will promote service efficiency (see the New Public Management literature, especially Hood, 1991, for a summary of these arguments). While the controversy over whether privatization or pluralization actually improves government functions is ongoing, one documented drawback of this approach is that market competition often reduces social accountability and social equity in public services (Joshi, 2008). However, effective and socially equitable service provision is central to achieving poverty reduction; ill-health as a result of poor or absent services can prompt the descent into poverty, and reinforces vulnerability and insecurity among marginalized groups (Joshi, 2008). At the intersection of poverty alleviation interventions and the solid waste management system stands the waste-picker, or more specifically, informal sector waste worker. This paper examines innovations in the delivery of urban waste management through a case study of Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP), a union of waste-pickers based in Pune, and the Solid Waste Collection and Handling Cooperative (SWaCH), a novel doorstep waste collection cooperative that resulted from the union's joint effort with Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC). This collaboration not only reformed solid waste management and service delivery across Pune, but it also improved the lives, incomes and working conditions of the waste-pickers themselves, addressing the issues of both poverty and sanitation. As a case of two disparate institutions joining to create an innovative solution for improved service provision, their story is a good example of successful coproduction; it is useful and unusual because accounts of such partnerships are seldom told. In examining the nascent cooperative SWaCH, its origins, logic and future challenges, I draw out lessons for planners strategizing for poverty alleviation and improved basic services. This case study describes development processes that not only confront solid waste management issues, but the poverty and insecurity of a highly vulnerable and marginalized urban population. Similarly, this case fills a gap in our understanding of cross-sectoral partnerships for service provision as it represents an arrangement involving not just the State and the market, or the State and civil society, but segments and components of all three.