Revisiting the role of funding: Lessons from expenditure and performance on cleanliness in Indian cities

Executive Summary

In India, an estimated 480 million people—1.5 times the entire population of the United States —live in cities and towns and this is expected to increase to about 600 million by 2030. Other than the scale, there is not much to cherish about the quality of life Indian cities offer to an average city dweller. For example, only 75-80% of municipal waste is collected, a marginal improvement from 72% in 2010, and out of this, only about 22-28% is processed and treated. Similarly, water availability is about 70 lpcd in urban areas compared to 135-150 lpcd required for hygienic living, and the list goes on. However, a low level of service delivery is not fait accompli for a lower middle-income country like India. In 2011, an Indian government appointed High Powered Expert Committee (HPEC) noted that “the state of urban service delivery in India’s cities and towns is far poorer than is desirable for India’s current income levels.” (HPEC, 2011, p.43)

There is widespread realisation in India of the need to undertake fundamental reforms in urban governance, planning and funding to enable cities to provide globally accepted service delivery levels. Poor service delivery, despite being a multifaceted problem, is often attributed largely to lack of funding. India’s municipal revenue as a percent of GDP has remained constant at 1% since 2007-08. This is very low compared to other developing nations such as Brazil and South Africa whose ratio stood at 7.4% and 6% respectively in 2010.

Estimates suggest that India needs to spend six to eight times more per capita on urban infrastructure, every year, for the next 15-20 years to be able to provide acceptable levels of service delivery across key urban services. Around 80%[1] of this estimated spend is required to build capital intensive urban infrastructure like affordable housing, mass rapid transit systems like metro network, more roads, etc. and relatively little is needed to provide services like solid waste management (SWM), which keep cities clean, but are not capital intensive. Since capital intensive urban infrastructure in most Indian cities is not financed by the urban local bodies (ULBs) anyway, it begs the question, is lack of funding really the primary reason Indian cities are not able to provide acceptable levels of services such as SWM. Furthermore, is it true that higher the spending on SWM, better the service delivery?

We probe these questions by comparing revenue expenditure[2] that our sample of 27 cities are incurring on SWM services, relative to what they ought to spend[3] to provide acceptable levels of service delivery, with their current performance on cleanliness.[4] The results are counterintuitive. Lack of funding is not a binding constraint in every city to deliver acceptable levels of SWM services. Nineteen out of 27 cities spend more than the required amount, yet none has a perfect cleanliness score. Nine out of these 19 spend at least 1.5 times more than the benchmark amount. Secondly, while expenditure has a significantly positive influence, it explains only 23% of the variation in performance, indicating the importance of non-monetary factors such as better city governance.

While there is overwhelming evidence that city finances need to be strengthened significantly, the findings of this paper suggest that there is an equally important need to map the expenditure and outcomes achieved across a range of urban services. This would help establish where funding is a real constraint, and where lower service delivery could be due to other reasons such as inefficient and ineffective usage of funds. This will increase transparency and accountability and improve allocation of funds across services within a city. It will also help unearth best practices amongst Indian cities, which may be easier to adopt than global best practices since they are located within our political economy. Early observations suggest the key role that stable city leadership, effective public-private partnerships, and citizen engagement have played in providing better SWM services. For example top performing cities such as Indore has had the same mayor and commissioner since 2015 and has involved 850 Self-Help Groups (SHGs) for citizen awareness campaign on waste segregation; Amdavad and Pune municipal corporations have adopted a PPP model to collect and transport waste from the city. Focus on expenditure and outcomes assumes even greater importance due to the fiscal stress caused by COVID-19, making devolution of funds to the third tier all the more challenging.

India is urbanising rapidly; the urban share of population has steadily increased from 18% in 1971 to about 34% by 2020. It is expected to touch 40% by 2030, amounting to approximately 600 million urban inhabitants. Increasing urbanisation is a systemic phenomenon observed globally, characterised by the workforce moving away from agriculture to non-agriculture jobs and people moving away from villages to cities in pursuit of better livelihoods. While urbanisation has followed the standard script, the same may not be true with respect to how much value India has derived from this rural-urban shift. The urban share of Net Domestic Product (NDP) was 38% in 1971, which grew steadily to 52% by 2000. However, from 2000 to 2012, the urban share of NDP has remained constant at 52%. Since the urban population has increased steadily from 2000 to 2011, the constant urban share of NDP implies that per capita urban NDP growth has been lower than rural growth during this time period. This may be an indication that urban centres are not able to create enough high productive jobs and/or not allowing existing inhabitants to increase their productivity fast enough. It is noteworthy that increasing share of urban NDP between 1971-2000 and stagnant share between 2000 to 2012 is accompanied by increasing share of rural manufacturing, which steadily increased from 26% of overall manufacturing in 1971 to 51% by 2012 (Chand, Srivastava, & Singh, 2017). It would be interesting to observe whether urban share of NDP increases over time to around 60% by 2020 as estimated by multiple credible sources.

Low and deteriorating levels of basic civic services could be one of the reasons for lower productivity growth in urban areas compared to the countryside in the more recent years. As shown in Figure 2, in an ideal scenario, 100% of the solid waste generated must be collected. For Indian cities, currently only 78% of solid waste is collected. Poor service delivery is not only a problem pertaining to SWM. The acceptable level of water supply should be between 135-150 litres per capita per day in an urban setting; at present, Indian cities provide about 70 litres per capita per day (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, 2019). This hampers their ability to create gainful employment for a large share of the population and provide services necessary for a dignified human life.

A low level of service delivery is not a fait accompli for a lower-middle-income country such as India. In 2011, a government appointed High Powered Expert Committee (HPEC) had noted that “the state of urban service delivery in India’s cities and towns is far poorer than is desirable for India’s current income levels.” (HPEC, 2011, p.43).

Literature suggests improvements in planning, governance and funding, coupled with innovative practices and use of technology as the key building blocks to improve service delivery (MGI, 2010). While efforts have been made to improve on these, implementation remains woefully inadequate and largely on paper. For example, the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA) of 1992, which recognised Panchayats and urban local bodies (ULB) as the third tier of government, was a step in the right direction. However, nothing much has changed on this front over the last 20-30 years. “Key problems in urban governance include weak legal and institutional framework within which the ULBs operate and their poor capacity including lack of professional and sensitised cadre, to perform their development and regulatory functions” (Planning Commission, 2011,p.2). Likewise, the Fifteenth Finance Commission report for 2020-21 recommended that 4.31% of the divisible revenue pool should be allocated to local bodies, up from 3.54% in 2019-20. Despite this higher provision, ULBs are largely dependent on Central and State grants which constrain their ability to invest in infrastructure and improve quality of service delivery. Municipal tax revenue as a share of GDP has declined from 0.30% to 0.25% between 2010 and 2018. During the same period, the combined tax revenue of Centre and States as a share of GDP has increased from 16% to 18% (Ahluwalia, et al., 2019).

The existing work on service delivery by Indian municipalities can be classified into three broad strands. The first focuses on the fundamental reforms to improve service delivery, most often concluding that increasing funding is the most crucial aspect. A second set of studies focuses on the input side of service delivery, giving primacy to municipal governance. The third strand links input indicators with outcomes achieved in terms of service delivery. This paper adds to the third strand of literature by linking expenditure with service delivery and its performance.

Fundamental reforms to improve service delivery, especially higher funding: Two major reports on urban reforms in India, McKinsey Global Institute (2010) and High Powered Expert Committee (2011) defined urbanisation as an inevitable outcome of the faster rate of growth to which the India economy has transited, and yet cities are failing their residents in providing basic quality of life. These reports conclude that one of the most critical puzzles to solve is to generate adequate funding for building and maintaining urban infrastructure to improve service delivery. India’s municipal revenue as a percent of GDP has remained constant at 1%, which is very low compared to other developing nations such as Brazil and South Africa whose ratio stood at 7.4% and 6% respectively in 2010 (Ahluwalia, et al., 2019). MGI (2010) estimates that India needs to spend US$1.2 trillion on urban infrastructure over the following 20 years and suggested that a large chunk of this expenditure can be financed by cities themselves, especially by the larger ones. Majority of this investment requirement is for capex intensive activities; In MGI (2010), 82% of $1.2 trillion investment is devoted to urban roads, mass transit and affordable housing.  In HPEC (2011), 70.3% of INR 30.9 trillion is devoted to urban roads and urban transport. This infrastructure spend was estimated keeping in mind urban inhabitants by 2030 and how much does it cost on a per capita basis to provide for acceptable service delivery levels for each of the key urban services. Successive Finance Commissions have also endorsed higher financial devolution to cities, resulting in share of urban bodies increasing from 0.78% of the divisible revenue pool in the Eleventh Finance Commission to 4.3% in the just concluded Fifteenth Finance Commission (Aiyar, 2021).

Weak governance constrains decision making and financial sustainability of ULBs: There is a lack of stable and sound decision-making at the municipality level (Glaeser, 2019; Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, 2017). Janaagraha’s annual survey of India’s city system (ASICS), which scores cities based on their quality of life, policies and institutional processes to evaluate the quality of governance, finds 10 months to be the average tenure of a municipal commissioner, which is too short to make any meaningful contribution to a city’s functioning. About 54% of cities do not generate enough revenue to meet their salary costs and 70% of the cities had budget variance of over 30%, pointing to instability in management and resource allocation. Despite the benefits attached to having an independent source of revenue, municipal revenue has remained stagnant at 1% of GDP between 2007-08 and 2017-18. Moreover, ULBs in India are heavily dependent on higher-level government transfers and are not empowered to mobilise financial resources through raising taxes or levying user fees or unlocking land value. The current user charges are insufficient to cover Operation and Maintenance (O&M) expenditure and absence of business models eliminate possible private investments (Ahluwalia, et al., 2019). The State Finance Commissions (SFC) make recommendations regarding sharing of taxes and revenues between the state and its respective Municipalities and Panchayats, and formulate action plans for the cities on various fronts. However, the latest fifth SFC report refers to different time periods for different states.[5] Furthermore, even if majority of the suggestions are accepted by the state government, they are not actually implemented (Gupta & Chakraborty, 2019).

Linking input and output of service delivery: There is relatively less literature for this third strand linking input with outcomes. Bandyopadhyay (2014) in a study covering 718 ULBs in Tamil Nadu, finds that ULBs with better revenue-generating ability have higher efficiency in resource utilisation and service delivery. Similarly, ‘Municipal Performance Index’ (MPI), one of the latest initiative by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India, ranks cities based on an index comprising of various input and outcome indicators. It evaluates 111 municipalities across five broad verticals, namely: Governance, Technology, Planning, Services, and Finance. MPI’s findings suggest that municipalities without financial autonomy have weaker governance and poorer service delivery.

The current paper contributes to this third strand of literature by attempting to establish a link between expenditure incurred and outcomes achieved on SWM services. It is worth pointing out that the major studies (MGI, HPEC) that focused on urbanisation challenges in India and offered recommendations on how to correct these issues including the need to significantly increase urban infrastructure did not look at existing efficiency or sufficiency of expenditure across key services and whether there is scope to achieve better service delivery without spending more. Since India is still a lower middle-income country, it is imperative to optimize efficiency and this paper is an attempt in that direction.

Despite the clear and present need to improve city finances, it is not obvious if resource scarcity is a good enough explanation for why Indian cities seem unable to provide acceptable levels of services such as solid waste management, which are relatively resource light. The question becomes more acute since most cities do not spend, from their budgets, in building capital-intensive urban infrastructure. This paper attempts to shed light on this conundrum by asking to what extent is lack of funding the primary reason why Indian cities are not clean enough? And secondly, is it true that higher the spending, cleaner is the city?

We tried to probe this by linking expenditure on SWM and city[6] cleanliness for a sample of 27 cities for which both the data points are available for a common year. SWM was a natural choice to link service delivery with expenditure, because of three main reasons. First, input and outcome variables are both available. For input, we have used revenue expenditure on municipal SWM available from the budget documents and for outcome, we used results of the Swachh Survekshan (SS) 2016 survey, which ranks urban local bodies (ULBs) on the basis of their performance in managing SWM. Such regular surveys are not available for other services, such as water supply, public transport, etc. Second, performance on SWM is mainly dependent on revenue expenditure as the associated activities are daily garbage collection, salaries of employees, etc. The ideal share of capital expenditure in total expenditure on SWM is 15% , while for other services such as urban transport and urban roads, the share is significantly higher at 60% and 80%, respectively (McKinsey Global Institute, 2010; High Powered Expert Committee, 2011). Thus, ceteris paribus, cleanliness of a city is significantly more dependent on ‘here and now’ type revenue expenditure. Third, SWM is one of the most basic services and is provided by municipalities everywhere, as opposed to some combination of state and cities for other services like transport, which might muddle the link between expenditure and performance.

Swachh Survekshan survey

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Government of India, has been publishing the world’s largest cleanliness survey, Swachh Survekshan, since 2016. Starting with evaluating the performance of 73 major cities in 2016, it expanded to 4,242 cities and towns by 2020. The survey evaluates performance on two main civic services: solid waste management, and elimination of open defecation. 65% of the evaluation pertains to SWM,[7] making it appropriate to measure delivery of SWM services.

The survey methodology involves three stages; first, self-assessment of service level progress; second, observations by an independent body to verify self-assessment; and third, collecting citizen feedback.[8] (Table 1).

We looked at each question in the service level progress section of the survey and categorised them into either input or outcome bucket; input referred to processes and mechanisms, whereas outcome referred to metrics linked to actual outcomes with respect to service delivery levels, such as garbage collected, transported, treated, etc. Our assessment indicates that 70% of weightage in the survey is given to achieving SWM and sanitation outcomes,[10] and only a minor proportion for inputs.[11]

Surveys could be volatile and/or faulty. To check for the stability of the survey, we analysed SS marks for cities that have ranked in the top 20 at least once between 2016 and 2020 and have also been included in the survey for all the five years. In Table 2, the percentage scores have been colour-graded for each city across time. A majority of the cities show stable performance in the survey. That is, if they start strong, they remain strong and vice versa, and if they improve or worsen, it is more a systematic change than volatility caused by the survey. For example, Mysuru’s score is between 87-89% and New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) score is between 84-90%, through the five years. The survey also captures cities such as Ghaziabad, which started weak in 2016 with a score of 41%, but has shown consistent improvement and reached 71% by 2020. Lastly, the results are broadly intuitive; richer and better planned municipalities like NDMC and Chandigarh Municipal Corporation, for example, have high scores and industrial towns like Kanpur and Jamshedpur are relatively lower in this list. Given its outcome focus, coupled with plausibly correct and stable results, we felt comfortable using it as an outcome indicator.

As with any other survey, there are some limitations to the methodology and implementation of SS as well. First, the independent observation section of the survey is based on randomly selected parts of the city, such as a random selection of seven wards out of four zones to assess the claim of door to door garbage collection, or a sample of randomly selected shopkeepers/vendors to assess the claim of daily sweeping. But the survey does not mention the method followed for this random selection, which would be appropriate to remove bias between richer and poorer parts of the city. Second, in the citizen feedback component, the authors filled out the 2021 survey form and found that the questions are subjective, asking respondents to rate the overall cleanliness of commercial and residential areas. Third, the citizen feedback component of the survey can be taken multiple times by one individual possessing multiple phone numbers. Lastly, there has been a significant reduction in internal consistency of the survey components over the years. In 2016, the correlation between different stages of the survey ranged between 0.51 to 0.70, but in 2020, the range reduced to 0.09-0.52, indicating higher disparity in ranking done under different stages of the survey.

Municipal expenditure on SWM

Providing SWM services is a municipal duty in most Indian cities. We found municipal spend data on SWM for 39 major ULBs, which were also part of the SS in 2016.[12] Since municipal accounts are known to be relatively less reliable, we scrutinised them closely to try and minimise the degree of unreliability in our analyses. Post-stress-testing the budget documents, 27 ULBs were selected for the final sample and analyses.

Challenges of dealing with municipal accounts

• Municipal budget documents are not uniform across cities. Municipal budgets capture SWM spend in two broad types, direct and indirect spend. Direct type refers to cities that capture SWM spend in their budgets as a distinct line item. Indirect type refers to cities whose SWM expenditure is estimated by adding relevant categories such as door-door waste collection, garbage collection, salaries of ‘safai karamchari’, mosquito eradication etc. As shown in the budget snapshots below, Indore municipal corporation’s budget clearly mentions expenditure on SWM; however, Greater Hyderabad’s municipal corporation budget does not clearly mention the same. For the latter, we added multiple categories to create a SWM expenditure by the municipal corporation.

In our final sample of 27 cities, for 12 cities the SWM spend was directly available and for 15, we estimated it by adding the individual line items. To make sure we didn’t err in estimating SWM spend for the indirect type cities, we compared the ratio of SWM to revenue expenditure for both the categories and found no systematic over or under estimation across the two archetypes.

• Some budget documents were available only in the local language. For example, the Amdavad Municipal Corporation budget is available only in Gujarati. In addition to local languages, making the budget documents available in a more widespread language would permit both government and non-government entities to refer to them for policy and research. Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy has taken a step in the right direction with CityFinance, a platform that serves as a national framework of standardised, timely and credible financial information on cities. The need is to deepen this initiative, so that it captures and shares disaggregated budget details in a standardised format and language.
• Differences across budget estimates, revised estimates and actual expenditure. Budgets for a particular year may be available in three distinct formats calculated at different time periods: budget estimates, revised estimates and actual expenditure. Usually, level of precision improves between budget estimates to revised estimates and from revised estimates to actual expenditure. Budget estimates are available for all the cities in our cohort, whereas actual expenditure is available just for a handful of cities. There could be significant divergence across the different types of estimates. For example, for Gurgaon, actual expenditure for 2016-17 was 30% less than the budget estimate. Similarly, Praja Foundation (2018) highlighted the under-utilisation of Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation budget: In 2016-17, 73% of the budget allocated to roads was unutilised; 33-35% of the health budget remained unutilised between 2014 and 2016. Also, we found that for 2014 and 2015, the actual expenditure on SWM is 20-22% less than the budget estimated.

Share of expenditure on SWM in overall revenue expenditure ranged between 2% to 30% in our cohort of 27 cities. Ahluwalia & Patel (2018) suggest that SWM accounts for 15%-25% of the municipal revenue expenditure. However, our range has been improvised based on the trend evident from seemingly reliable data. Indore and Pune, for which revised estimates were available from direct sources, SWM was only two and five percent respectively of their overall revenue expenditure. We examined the relationship between share of SWM in revenue expenditure and the absolute per-capita revenue expenditure. Four key observations emerged from analysing municipal spend on SWM for these 27 cities:

• Share of SWM spend declines with overall revenue expenditure. On an average, the share of solid waste management in total revenue expenditure is lower for cities with higher overall revenue expenditure, as evident from Figure 4. For example, Bhubaneswar spends 29% of overall revenue expenditure on SWM, and its revenue expenditure per-capita is INR 2,200, compared to Coimbatore which spends 3% on SWM when its annual revenue expenditure per-capita is INR 6,400. Since SWM is a basic service, it commands a significantly higher share of spend when budgets are limited. However, its share declines as cities get richer, indicating that the spend required on SWM is not expenditure elastic. In other words, if cities have more money to spend, they would not proportionately increase the spend on SWM.

• Big cities spend significantly more per capita on SWM, despite not generating higher waste per capita. On comparing the per-capita SWM revenue expenditure of cities across different population classifications, we see that big cities, on average, spend 1.6 times and 1.8 times of what is spent by cities having population between 1-5 million and less then 1 million, in per-capita terms, respectively (Figure 5). Greater Mumbai has a population of more than 5 million and spends INR 1234 annually on SWM. Bhopal with a population of 1-5 million and Kochi with a population less than 1 million , spends INR 373 and INR 296 respectively annually on SWM. This is because bigger cities are usually richer and hence can afford to spend more in absolute amount on SWM.

What is intriguing is that this higher spend is not attributed to higher per capita waste generation in these bigger cities. The correlation between per-capita waste generated and spend is negative 0.25. Two-thirds of our cities generate per-capita annual waste within the +20/-20% median range. This trend is also evident across the three population classes of cities as well. Three out of four cities in ‘more than 5 million’ population bracket generate per-capita annual waste within the above stipulated range. Similarly, five out of six cities with ‘less than 1 million’ population generate waste within the median range. And finally, 11 out of 17 of the cities in ‘between 1 to 5 mil0lion’ population classification are within the median waste generation range. (Figure 6).

• On an average, capital cities tend to spend more than their peer cities in the same state. For example, Greater Mumbai in Maharashtra has the highest SWM per-capita expenditure of INR 1,234 compared to Pune at INR 910, Navi Mumbai at INR 469 and Thane at INR 760. Similarly, in Gujarat, the capital city Gandhinagar (INR 771) spends thrice that of Amdavad (INR 273). In Madhya Pradesh, Bhopal (INR 373) spends thrice that of Indore (INR 108) and in Haryana, Chandigarh (INR 438) spends double of Gurgaon (INR 282). In Karnataka, Bengaluru (INR 555) spends almost double of Hubli and Dharwad (INR 313). This may be because capital cities get higher budgetary allocation from the state, allowing them to spend more.

It is important to realise that Public Private Partnerships play a big role in the provisioning of SWM services across a large number of Indian cities. PPPs have a central role, especially in the collection and transportation of solid waste. There are two ways this usually takes place:

• The private company collects, transports and segregates waste and charges a user fee to all the households or commercial areas it caters to. For example, in Pune, SWaCH caters to 850,000 households and charges a user fee of INR 70 per household per month. Similarly, in Greater Mumbai, the municipal corporation caters to 75 lakh slum population for SWM. The corporation annually spends INR 80 crore, which is a matching grant equivalent to twice the money generated through user fees collected from the slums of INR 20 per household per month.[13]
• The municipal corporation gives out contracts for garbage collection, transportation and segregation to third parties. But the third parties do not charge the people any fees and are compensated by the municipalities.

Recommended SWM spend per-capita benchmark

HPEC (2011) recommends per-capita O&M expenditure requirement for eight services provided by cities across different population classification. HPEC O&M expenditure consist of O&M of physical assets, staff, and related administrative cost which is equivalent to the revenue expenditure in our analysis.^[14] For SWM, benchmark O&M spend is estimated to achieve perfect service delivery. “The assessment of investment requirements by the Committee is based on the service standards prepared by the ministry of Urban Development which is: 100 percent waste collection, treatment and disposal of solid waste for all cities” (HPEC, 2011). We have adjusted the recommended expenditure by taking into account the inflation as of 2016.

We compare revenue expenditure that our sample of 27 cities are incurring on SWM services, relative to what they ought to spend to provide acceptable levels of service delivery, with their current performance on cleanliness based on Swachh Survekshan. HPEC (2011) recommended per-capita revenue expenditure for SWM is taken as the benchmark spending. Two key findings emerge out of our analysis:

• Majority of cities in our sample spend more than the HPEC benchmark. 19 out of 27 cities in our sample spend more than the HPEC revenue expenditure benchmark, and yet none of these cities achieve ‘perfect’ SWM service delivery standards as expected by HPEC (Figure 7). Also, for a large number of these cities, the spend is significantly higher than the benchmark. Nine out of these 19 spend at least 1.5 times more than the benchmark amount. Clearly, for these cities, spend is not the binding constraint explaining the inadequate provisioning of SWM services. It points to the need to look at efficiency and effectiveness of the expenditure.

• Funding explains about 23% of the variance in SWM performance. We analysed cleanliness performance as a function of SWM spending and amount of waste generated. Our results indicate that while SWM spend per-capita is positive and statistically significant at 1% level, waste generation is completely insignificant. The Adjusted R-square is 0.23 meaning that SWM spend per-capita explains only 23% of variation in SS performance (Table 4).[15]

Funding remains an important component to improve service delivery for cities such as Ranchi and Guwahati, whose spend in 2016 was INR 157 and INR 130 respectively, much lower than the HPEC benchmark of INR 302[16] and have a poor SS survey score of 44% and 52%. Nonetheless, this is not universal; cities that spend more are not necessarily better off than those who spend less. For example, in the population category of ‘more than 5 million’, Amdavad and Greater Mumbai scored 73% and 77% in 2016 SS respectively but have large variations in their per-capita SWM revenue spent of INR 273 and INR 1234 respectively. Jaipur and Chandigarh, both with population between 1-5 million, have similar spend per-capita of INR 430 and INR 438 respectively on SWM and yet have a stark difference in their scores, 62% and 86% respectively (Figure 7).

We have made a sincere effort to underscore the importance of mapping a closer relationship between funding and outcomes of service delivery in urban centres using SWM as an example. We hope that this exercise helps policymakers and practitioners to identify if it is indeed the lack of money, or lack of effectiveness in utilization that hampers effective service delivery. Our early observations point to three possible non-monetary factors explaining better performance on SWM.

• Stable city leadership – municipal commissioners and mayors who have been in position for a long period are more able to improve the service delivery.
  • In Indore, both the mayor and the commissioner of the municipal corporation have held their positions since 2015.
  • In Ghaziabad, the mayor has been in position since 2017. Ghaziabad had approximately constant revenue expenditure in 2018 and 2019; however, it has been consistently improving its performance and entered the list of top 20 cities in the survey by
  • Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, (2017) finds 10 months to be the average tenure of a municipal commissioner, which is too short to make any meaningful contribution to a city’s functioning.
• Citizen involvement – cities which have achieved better SWM results have also been successful in involving their citizens in the process. This has been possible by encouraging a behavioural change to promote waste segregation at the household level.[17]
  • Indore achieved 100% household waste segregation permitting the municipal corporation to eliminate garbage dumps. In 2011, the municipal solid waste collected was 750MT/ day, which increased to 1115MT/day in 2017, collected from source. Indore deployed public awareness campaigns on how households could convert waste into useful products such as compost and fuel. This was possible because of the municipal corporation’s active participation, along with non-government organisations (NGOs) and private entities. The municipal corporation, with the help of 850 Self-Help Groups, spread the message about the importance of waste segregation at source, and conducted composting awareness campaigns. (Smart City Indore, 2017).
  • The municipal corporation of Nawanshahr in Punjab started a massive behavioural change campaign in September 2017, which was a decentralised and cost-effective approach to SWM with the participation of community members. Within a year, they achieved 100% source segregation, and the city has become almost bin-less, transforming Nawanshahr into the number one ULB in the North Zone in the 2020 SS survey (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, 2019).

• Public private partnership – better performing cities allow for division of responsibilities between municipalities and the private sector, thereby improving service delivery.
  • Amdavad consistently ranked in the top 20 in SS between 2016 and 2020. Effective Public Private Partnership (PPP) has played a big role in Amdavad’s performance on SWM. To ensure household waste segregation, and efficient collection of waste, Amdavad introduced a waste collection system, collaborating with private contractors who deployed vehicles with body containers to collect waste directly from residential areas and transport it to dumping sites. In total, 866 vehicles collect waste from 14 lakh residences, covering all seven zones of the city. The waste collection is not restricted to households and also includes waste of street food vendors and restaurant kitchen waste. These vehicles have GPS and RFID to enable monitoring of movement and functioning (Tata Trusts, 2019). Amdavad also instituted PPP at three other levels: Construction and demolition waste management, composting of flower waste, and material recovery.

HPEC (2011) refers to governance as the weakest and the most crucial link where improvement is necessary to support the urban transformation in India. “Without this, additional capital investments in urban infrastructure will not result in improvements in service delivery” (HPEC, 2011, p.14). Our study on spend and outcomes on SWM and early observations on potential non-monetary factors points in the same direction.

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