G.V. Suresh, aged 27, is a farmer based in Gundlagurki, Chickballapur district, near Bengaluru. He specializes in growing roses and potatoes on his piece of land but has now shifted to organic compost. This has helped him to greatly reduce expenditure and at the same time improve sustainability of farming practices.
G.V. Suresh is one of the farmers associated with a City-Farmer Partnership for Solid Waste Management project in Chickballapur – a project administered by the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru with the assistance of the Chickballapur City Municipal Council (CCMC) and Godrej Properties Limited (GPL).
This project converts organic wet wastes into compost for the farmers, helps self-help groups (SHGs) to recycle textile wastes and gives direction for the disposal of non-recyclable plastic. The objectives include the availability of organic compost for farmers, the promotion of appropriate farming methods, and the provision of knowledge and skills on proper waste disposal.
In this project wet waste is sourced from different municipal council areas and carried to farms where they are stored in compost pits, allowed to decomposed into compost and gifted to the farmers. This three year planned project is anticipated to benefit more than 200 farmers and over a period of time help in processing over 33, 000 ton of solid waste. The project that started in March this year, so far, identified 251 farmers within 21 villages around Chickballapur, out of which 121 farmers participated in the wet waste sorting exercise and out of 109 farmers were issued with compost. A total of 1k tons of waste was delivered to the farmers 759 tons of which was subsequently processed into compost.
Challenge in small towns
Reason for the project within a small town is a problem where disposal of waste is only this kind of a challenge in the big cities, which is now also becoming a problem in small towns’s and the rural setups too.
Even with less populous populations, there are still regions that do not have this capacity due to the lack of appropriate infrastructure, resources and regulatory conditions for waste management. Common causes are bad disposal methods, informal dump sites or lack of recyclables for reuse, which all pose dangers to the environment and general population.
Appreciation has been received towards The Chickballapur project of City-Farmer Partnership for Solid Waste Management of IIHS for successfully meeting this problem by encouraging scientific measures of all sorts of solid waste management.
As noted in The Hindu, Pushkara S.V., senior manager in IIHS and one of the initiators of the project commented, there is a need to implement projects like this one in other small cities in the country.
“Besides the metropolitan cities of Bengaluru, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi, there are approximately 5,000 other cities in India. Out of these, nearly 500 are cities with populations of over a lakh such as Tumakuru, Mysuru, Mangaluru. These 4,500 cities are of much lesser population. Most of the solid waste management projects undertaken by urban local bodies in metros emphasize on waste management techniques which are more capital intensive for the local bodies. However, this is not feasible in smaller cities because of shortage of funds and other many factors. Collecting waste and just dumping it in a landfill has been the cure all for waste disposal in slowly developing cities like Chickballapur,” he concludes.
But the project wanted to change this module. “There was an urban body here, and we asked them if they were willing to give their wet waste to farmers who could put it into use by making compost on their farms. We knew that farmers are very knowledgeable about the topics of composting, so there was no shame in going to them. More than 250 farmers were spoken to and persuaded to set up compost pits on their own farmlands, instruction was given to some of the farmers on how to prepare compost, and the farmers were made aware of the advantages of using organic compost as opposed to chemical fertilizers. Of course, the farmers do not pay for this compost as they don’t buy it from us, which benefits the farmers as well and reduces the processing fee in a way to the municipal council,” Pushakara added.
Chickballapur municipality commissioner Uhama Shankar states that, at first, the municipal body was worried whether the farmers would be willing to carry out the wet waste processing on their fields, but now it is a success. Waste management was one of our growing areas of concern as a university municipal council which included provision of waste collection on a regular basis. We used to do insulated collection of wet and dry waste streams, but not to the optimal level of segregation and not to the fullest. Typically, we used to receive around 3-3.5 tonnes of wet waste, and on a daily basis, the volumes were not, as we would have hoped, adequate as our processing techniques were not very good. When IIHS came to us with this idea, we were not sure if this was practical, we were not sure if farmers were okay receiving wet waste from us, as they feared it would be mixed with plastic or other dry waste. But we along with IIHS gave it a try, and the farmers were also supportive.
Wet waste has also been taken to the hollows/farms, where IIHS has taken their organic mass to the hollows for improved compost as well. Now there has been a shift among the municipal councils with more time being devoted to the collection of dry waste as half of the burden has been alleviated, added Shankar.
Chemical to organic fertilizer
At the same time, Suresh is overjoyed at the transformation that the modern farming system has brought in his works. “We used to use cow dung only and chemical fertilizers in our farms. But people from IIHS introduced us that there is organic compost. Then I began using the compost and immediately I saw the improvement and the good results. We have observed increase in the size of the potatoes and the roses are also blooming beautifully,” recounted the young farmer.
“Buying fertilizers and compost from vendors, for instance, would also cost us about six thousand rupees for each tractor load. Transportation is an extra burden we do not have to incur anymore as the compost pits are on our farms,” Suresh explained.
To describe, so did K. Gangappa. It is necessary to point out that Gangappa is a 56-year-old florist and grape farmer from Anakanur in the Chickballapur district who was among the first farmers to embrace this initiative. “We have got our first load of compost through this project, and it has been very fruitful. The making of the compost pits on the farms of all the farmers who are part of this project has also been a great help. For every production cycle, we used to incur a cost of transport of fertilizers and composts of anywhere between ₹6000 – ₹7000, but now, all that is on our own farms. Even the wet waste movement from the land fill site to our farm is also taken care of.”
“I am very happy that the crop that I have harvested has improved in quality and is selling quite readily,” Gangappa said. “The quality of the produce and the amounts have improved heaps,” he said, noting however that he has no plans of ever abandoning this newly discovered practice of land fertilization.
