Sowete-ü K Letro and Bendangwala Walling, founded e-Circle in 2018 in partnership with Hulladek Recycling Pvt Ltd, Kolkata, to collect and channelise e-waste, a stream for which no ULB in the state maintains any records.
Morung Express News
Dimapur | March 30
Amid a sweeping indictment of Nagaland's urban waste management, the CAG's performance audit paused in several places to document what was actually working.
Most of what it found came not from the state's three Municipal Councils but from smaller Town Councils and civil society.
Pfutsero Town Council, the smallest of the six sampled ULBs, drew the most praise. During joint physical verification, CAG auditors noted that community involvement in Pfutsero had produced visible results — "general level of cleanliness in the areas visited was significantly better as compared to other ULBs."
Pfutsero was the only ULB among the six to use audio public announcements as part of its awareness campaign. It installed plastic banks and segregation bins at public locations, carried out raids and seizures of banned plastic, transferred legacy waste into a bio-capped landfill site, and set up a scrap market where residents could earn from waste they brought in sorted.
In Pfutsero, the Chakhesang Women Welfare Society took on sanitary waste, one of the most consistently ignored waste streams across all six ULBs, by manufacturing cloth diapers and reusable sanitary pads. After attending training at the Training Resource Centre in Jalukie in January 2022, the Society passed on the knowledge to 30 self-help groups comprising 90 participants the following month.
Dimapur Municipal Council, despite featuring in several of the audit's more critical findings, had the only fully functional Material Recovery Facility among the six ULBs. It also practised bioremediation and bio mining at its dumpsite for treatment of legacy waste. In collaboration with the Nagaland Pollution Control Board, DMC constructed a one kilometre Polymer Bitumen road using waste plastic, This was cited by the CAG as a model for other departments.
Also in Dimapur, two women Sowete-u K Letro and Bendangwala Walling, founded e-Circle in 2018 in partnership with Hulladek Recycling Pvt. Ltd., Kolkata, to collect and channelise e-waste, a stream for which no ULB in the state maintains any records. By 2018, e-Circle had transported around 20 tonnes of e-waste to Kolkata for recycling. It has since set up 47 collection points across Dimapur town and conducts awareness sessions in schools and colleges.
At the Kohima Municipal Council dumping site, the CAG observed rag-pickers sorting recyclable waste, and noted their contribution explicitly as a good practice, in a report that separately found no ULB had taken any steps to formally recognise or integrate informal waste collectors into the system.
The CAG noted these practices to illustrate, in its words, “that these practices are possible in the field of waste management and can serve as examples to policy makers while framing policies.”
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