Private Sector Participation in Municipal Solid Waste Management: Sustainability Dynamics and Policy Correction

One of the most discernible outcome of the increasing pace of urbanisation, along with the rise in the spate of consumerism in the post-liberalised economic environment has been the dramatic rise in municipal solid waste generation across the urban centres world over and more so in the developing countries. So enormous has been the challenge of managing the same along with the issue of providing efficient service of garbage collection at household and city level that the municipalities since the mid nineties started turning to the private sector. The move was largely fuelled by the international institutions such as the World Bank and other organisations which demonstrated the higher capabilities of the private sector in providing services and managing waste much more efficiently then the Local Governments. Resultantly many developing countries including India turned to privatization as a panacea for their solid waste management woes. However while private sector participation in municipal solid waste management services across Indian cities have being adopted, there is an acute lack of empirical evidence and research assessing its implications from a sustainability perspective.Set against a milieu of solemn concerns emanating from inadequate municipal solid waste management on one side and the impetus given to private sector participation, this research critically examines and generates empirical evidence on the performance and implications of private sector participation in municipal solid waste management through the lens of a sustainability assessment prism specifically constructed for this purpose. In order to get to the depth of performance analysis, the research employs a single case study research design using the city of Amritsar as the case for application of the sustainability assessment framework. With robust evidence emerging from the four-cornered sustainability prism i.e. social, economic, environmental and institutional, the study offers valuable insights for retrospection and course correction in Indian cities and other similar contexts. More over one of the main contributions emerging from the research is the development of a sustainability assessment framework for evaluating privatized operations in waste management context. Thus the same can be used by Researchers and Governments across developing countries in particular to evaluate and assess privatized municipal solid waste management and apply the yardsticks of measurement across the social, economic, environmental and institutional dimensions of sustainability underlying such operations. The same would be immensely useful in informing Governmental policies in decision making related to improvising the operations, replicating the privatization models or replacing them with better options as the case may be.