Imlisanen Jamir
The Nagaland Home Department has directed every household in every village in the state to segregate waste into four colour-coded streams, wet, dry, sanitary, and household hazardous, as mandated under the Solid Waste Management Rules 2026. The notification is precise on colours. Green for kitchen scraps. Blue for plastic and glass. Red for expired medicines and broken thermometers. A separate wrapping for sanitary waste. What it does not specify is where any of this sorted waste is supposed to go once it leaves the household, because that part has never been built.
This is not the first time the state has issued such a directive. The SWM Rules 2016 required households to separate waste into three streams: wet, dry, and domestic hazardous. A decade on, an official of the Nagaland Pollution Control Board said publicly last month that household segregation remains “extremely low in reality,” and that the state is still struggling with targets that should have been met under Swachh Bharat Mission Phase 1, while Phase 2 has wound up across the rest of the country. The government’s answer to this failure is a fourth bin.
The Comptroller and Auditor General examined six Urban Local Bodies in Nagaland across six years and found the following. A Rs 48.63 crore processing plant in Kohima, built to handle the waste that segregation was supposed to produce, sits non-functional. Waste bins and sanitation vehicles worth Rs 4.75 crore were procured across the sampled ULBs without open tender and without e-procurement, yet the CAG noted that segregation remained on paper. Not one ULB operated a weighbridge at its dumping site, meaning nobody in the state government actually knows how much waste its towns generate. During the entire audit period, not a single ULB prepared a short-term or long-term waste management plan. When DMC sanitation workers stopped working in 2022 over unpaid salaries, there was no contingency protocol. Waste simply piled up because no one had thought to write down what to do when the truck stopped running. These findings were reported in this paper on March 30, 2026, citing the CAG performance audit covering the period April 2017 to March 2023.
The new directive extends this logic to villages. Rural Nagaland has its own organic waste practice, separating food scraps for animal feed, which quietly does what no government notification has managed to enforce in urban areas. The 2026 rules ask villagers to additionally sort their used syringes, compact fluorescent bulbs, and pesticide containers into red bags, without providing collection infrastructure, without trained personnel to handle hazardous material, and without a processing facility within any reasonable distance of most villages in the state.
There is a particular kind of governance that mistakes the directive for the deed. It issues rules, procures bins, prints colour codes, and holds sensitization workshops. It does all of this in place of the harder, slower, less visible work of building a backend that can actually receive what the household sorts. Nagaland has been aware of its waste crisis for at least two decades. The NPCB scientist who spoke to this paper last month was not describing a new problem. He was describing the same problem with one more bin added to it.
The four-stream mandate may be legally correct. As policy, it is the state doing what it has always done: writing the next chapter before it has finished building the last one.
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