Public waste and private property. An enquiry into the economics of solid waste in Calcutta
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230130102 |
| Published date | 01 February 1993 |
| Author | Anu Bose,Ian Blore |
| Date | 01 February 1993 |
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
AND
DEVELOPMENT, VOL.
13,1-15 (1993)
Public waste and private property
An enquiry into the economics
of
solid waste in Calcutta
ANU BOSE AND IAN BLORE
University
of
Birmingham
SUMMARY
Perceptions of solid waste management in India belong
to
a tradition of thought which dates
back
to
the early nineteenth century. Solid waste
is
often thought of
as
a purely municipal
problem. The paper examines how far informal systems of solid waste management are a
response to a void in property rights. It analyses the variety of local operations
in
Calcutta,
including the informal system. The assumptions that solid waste management is a public
good that therefore needs to be municipalized and that in the absence of municipalization
there would be greater costs are both questioned. It is hypothesized that there may be no
measurable economies of scale in any part of the waste cycle. It may be more worthwhile
to improve and expand the informal system of waste management than
to
collectivize further
the traditional system of collection, transportation and disposal.
INTRODUCTION: PERCEPTIONS
OF
SOLID WASTE
Speaking at a hastily organized seminar in
1978
on ‘Garbage Disposal in Big Cities
with Special Reference to Calcutta’, the then Minister for Local Government and
Urban Development in the Government of West Bengal (GoWB) described Calcutta’s
waste problem as vexatious. Speaker after speaker at the seminar denounced the
heaps of refuse lying on the streets or overflowing at collection points. They found
themselves agreeing for once with the fractious opposition Calcutta newspapers.
The Chief Finance Officer and Chief Accountant of the Calcutta Municipal Corpor-
ation (CMC) ingenuously described the problem as one of ‘planning and adminis-
tration with a bit of economics and engineering’. He admitted that ‘administration
of large numbers is always a large problem’. He did not refer to the cost to the
taxpayer of upgrading the city’s archaic refuse collection system, but implicitly
sug-
gested that the problem lay with the local government, the CMC.
On reading through the seminar papers, it is interesting that no one recommended
a hard or workable action except one official from pre-independence CMC days.
One speaker called for a return to house-to-house collection and an introduction
of contracting-out
of
refuse collection to private parties since the ‘experience in
developed countries had showed that the cost of handling garbage through contrac-
tors is lower and more effective than by a city corporation’s own department’. The
*Ian Blore is a lecturer in public finance and Anuradha Bose a researcher at the School
of
Public Policy
of
the University
of
Birmingham. Both have researched urban management
or
development in West
Bengal and conducted this research under a Nuffield Foundation research grant in collaboration with
the All India Institute
of
Hygiene and Public Health.
027 1-2075/93/01000 1-1 5$12.50
0
1993
by John Wiley
&
Sons, Ltd
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