As the date for reopening of the Kedarnath Dham draws closer, starting April 25 a large number of the valley population, including pitthuwalas, shopkeepers, municipal staff, and sanitation workers in Uttarakhand are excited for a different reason altogether.
The Rudraprayag district administration led by IAS Mayur Dixit will finally get to see if their Deposit Refund System for better waste disposal that uses QR code stickers would be able to eliminate 100 tons of garbage from the mountains.
Starting as a pilot project in May last year, the unique collaboration with Hyderabad-based IT-firm Recykal, has already been replicated all along the Char Dham route and beyond and even won an important award from the government.
Being one of the key Hindu pilgrimages, the Uttarakhand town witnesses major tourist footfall for nearly half the year which also leads to a huge amount of stress on its ecology due to waste accumulation.
The year 2022 alone saw around 16 lakh people visit the Lord Shiva temple which resulted in the piling of tons of trash strewn all around the sacred shrine.
This year, however, the Rudraprayag district administration under 2012 batch IAS officer Mr. Mayur Dixit proposes to tell a new tale of waste management.
DEPOSIT REFUND SYSTEM
This administration started its first step towards creating a digitally enabled behavioural change scheme for pilgrims undertaking the yatra in Aprill 2022.
Mr. Mayur Dixit told Indian Masterminds: “We wanted to create a process through which the waste reached the right place after disposal. This was only possible if the person disposing of the waste was inspired by an incentive.”
This is when the scheme titled the ‘Deposit Refund System’ (DRS) project was launched. It aims to collect every single plastic item sold be returned back to the collection system, so they cannot be littered. By DRS, consumers buy products and pay an additional amount (not a tax) which comprises a deposit. This deposit is fully refundable and reimbursed when one returns the empty packaging (bottle, sachet, chips packets, etc.) to the collection point.
SUCCESS
The DM said: “After numerous awareness drives over the past year, DRS has been successfully adopted by temple priests, pilgrims, pitthuwalas, shopkeepers, municipal staff, sanitation workers, among others.
He claimed a success rate of 52 percent, so far. The program has been successful in collecting over 10,00,000 containers in the region.
The app used in this project had an uptime of 99.9 percent with network availability. Moreover, all collected materials have now been channelised to recyclers and are boosting the local economy.
The Rudraprayag district’s initiative has won a ‘Digital India’ award in January under the category of ‘digital initiatives in collaboration with startups’.
REALITY CHECK
Following the success of the pilot and extensive support from the district administration and Swachh Bharat Mission, the DRS model has now extended to the 33 km track from Guptkashi to Kedarnath.
What first started in the Kedarnath Nagar panchayat area in May last year and later took up the Guptkashi to Gaurikund (a 55-km stretch) in September will be put to a bigger test.
Over 94,000 QR codes have been distributed across all shops along the Yatra route. “This time, we have also introduced multi-level plastic (MLP) and TetraPak containers along with PET bottles,” the officer said.
There will also be two reverse vending machines, mandating of all products sold on the stretch have QR code stickers across outlets, expansion of collection-cum-refund points along the path and setting up two Material Recovery Facility (MRF) one each at Sonprayag and Guptkashi.
With the scale of the program, the collective aim is to ensure a truly sustainable Swachh Kedarnath.
