The potential and scale of cities enable economic growth and the improvement of citizens’ access to jobs, education, healthcare, culture, public utilities and services. Solid waste management (SWM) is one of the key services provided by cities. Its operations are complex, very visible to the general public, and impacted by strong financial, societal, and political constraints. Performances in developing countries, however, are not positive. United Nations research shows urban collection services covering no more than 39% of the population in low-income countries. Why are many cities in developing countries not able to use their increasing wealth and scale for basic SWM services such as city cleaning, collection, and sustainable landfilling? This paper provides a review of literature on this question over the last decade. It shows that research is mostly on symptoms and has not led to a deeper diagnosis of causes. Lack of resources, infrastructure, awareness, and institutional strength are often pinpointed as causes but, in fact, they should be addressed as symptoms. These symptoms should be designated as dependent variables in a complex causal network with systemic feedbacks, hindering or neutralizing attempts to improve performances if not properly dealt with. Research should concentrate more on assessing the relations between urbanization, urban processes, and urban governance that shape the performance of urban solid waste management. System dynamics modeling may provide new approaches for this diagnosis.

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Cleanest cities in India 2017: Indore's meteoric rise to no. 1 spot

Failing Services on Urban Waste Management in Developing Countries: A Review on Symptoms, Diagnoses, and Interventions : A Review on Symptoms, Diagnoses, and Interventions

The failure mode and effect analysis method has been used to study the failure modes and its root cause and to give a clear idea about priorities while developing a new product or modifying the existing product. In this study, we have used the FMEA approach for litter picker machine in the design and development phase. In this study, we have applied the holistic system thinking to deconstruct the whole system into subassembly and then into parts. Finding failure mode for each part based on field failure data and given severity. Referring to RPN values, potential failure modes and its root causes are prioritized. By highlighting less reliable parts of the system, the spread of problem identifying process is reduced. It is ultimately focusing on the exact root cause of potential failure modes.

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) for Litter Picking Machine

The municipal solid waste management (MSWM) sector has remained quite neglected in India. As a result, most rapidly growing cities are eclipsed by heaps of garbage left in the open. Bulk of literature on the MSWM sector discusses a certain range of technoeconomic and managerial issues as major challenges. This paper, however, takes the policy perspective with the focus on operations in the last mile of the sector. It investigates the role of front-line workers involved in the last mile functions of collection and transportation of the solid waste in the city of Indore, which rose from the 149th rank in 2014 to 1st rank in 2017 in the national-level cleanliness survey and then remained at the top in 2018 and 2019. The paper concludes by underscoring critical importance of various reforms in the human resource management (HRM) in the city of Indore, such as stringent attendance system and systematization of working procedures in the last mile of operations. These reforms were supported by innovative tactical measures for ensuring accountability of citizens and front-line workers and by accommodating crucial actors from the old system. Together, these measures have helped Indore to rise and remain at the top-position in Cleanliness Ranking in the country.

Deciphering the Indore Story: Assessing Municipal Solid Waste Management in the Last Mile of Operations

It can be argued that the successful management of change is crucial to any organisation in order to survive and succeed in the present highly competitive and continuously evolving business environment. However, theories and approaches to change management currently available to academics and practitioners are often contradictory, mostly lacking empirical evidence and supported by unchallenged hypotheses concerning the nature of contemporary organisational change management. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to provide a critical review of some of the main theories and approaches to organisational change management as an important first step towards constructing a new framework for managing change. The article concludes with recommendations for further research.

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Organisational change management: A critical review

In the opinion of many observers the most serious malady from which the social sciences suffer at the present stage of their development, is their compartmentalism. At the theoretical level, most social scientists would agree that the subject-matter of all the specialized social disciplines is the same, namely human behaviour: in practice most specialists deal with some aspect or department or area of human behaviour, or human behaviour viewed from some “viewpoint.” This separation, however, into areas or aspects, convenient as it may be, or at least as it is asserted to be, for research purposes, is a somewhat arbitrary proceeding and it has resulted, among other things, in a breakdown of communication between the different social science compartments. Another result has been a less, not a greater, understanding of man. There is a strong case to be made, as Robert Lynd, for example, has made it, for the view that the social scientist is the worst example extant of the person who knows more and more about less and less. This is particularly sad when it is noted that less and less in such a context is the human animal, who is clearly a complicated and many faceted piece of work on any viewpoint or from any aspect.

Cleanest cities in India 2017: Indore's meteoric rise to no. 1 spot

Citations

Failing Services on Urban Waste Management in Developing Countries: A Review on Symptoms, Diagnoses, and Interventions : A Review on Symptoms, Diagnoses, and Interventions

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) for Litter Picking Machine

Deciphering the Indore Story: Assessing Municipal Solid Waste Management in the Last Mile of Operations

References

Organisational change management: A critical review

The Hawthorne Experiments 1