India: How a city-farmer partnership can help smaller cities solve their waste conundrum
The city-farmer partnership model does not require heavy investments in machinery, vehicles and infrastructure, drawing instead upon community engagement and local partnerships.
By Pushkara SV and Kiran D A
Citizen Matters
March 25, 2025
Excerpt:
To address this issue, the CCMC initiated the city-farmer partnership for SWM, with technical support from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) and funding from Godrej Properties Limited. This decentralised city-farmer partnership approach, connecting ULBs with peri-urban farmers, addresses many of these problems. ULBs supply segregated wet waste and support the farmers in setting up composting pits on their farms. This also keeps waste away from landfills.
The volunteering farmers then carry out the composting process directly in their own farms, obtaining the resulting organic compost at no additional cost. The composting cycle takes about three months, and the yield is 30% of the original waste input.
CCMC has reported that it has supplied over 3,000 tonnes of segregated wet waste to around 230 farmers in 23 nearby villages. Farmers add cow dung slurry and other bio-cultures to the composting pits to aid decomposition and monitor the moisture and temperature weekly, over the composting cycle of two to three months.
Solid waste generated in Indian cities is typically 60% wet waste, 30% dry waste, and 10% inert waste (mostly soil, silt, and stones which cannot be recycled). Yields are low – 15% or less, and high production costs and poor-quality compost make it an unviable option for many ULBs to process waste, recover organic compost and sell the same at a profit.
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Source: https://cityfarmer.info/india-how-a-city-farmer-partnership-can-help-smaller-cities-solve-their-waste-conundrum/
