Articles by Swati Singh Sambyal

Swati Singh Sambyal is a municipal solid waste expert, based in New Delhi, working with UN-Habitat India.

Housing is a fundamental social and economic need that determines the quality of life and health of people. Housing also underscores the deeply entrenched urban plight of our cities. 6.5 crore persons, that is 1 in every 6 persons, lived in slums and informal settlements in India in 2011. The existence of 33,510 slums, surveyed in 2013, in our 4,000 plus cities is another staggering statistic. Long-term marginalization of these neighbourhoods, is visible in the poor access to water and sanitation amenities in slum households. The census of 2011 showed that  43.3% households did not have water inside their homes…

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In the AC (After Corona) times, waste management systems across cities have borne the brunt, especially in developing countries where robust collection and processing systems are not streamlined. One area, which requires a lot of attention and work is plastic waste management, more so, because, addressing plastic waste leakage and gearing up to shift mindsets towards sustainable consumption of this resource material has become a challenge. In addition to this, are the faulty municipal systems that do not support segregation and sorting. In the Indian context, we are clearly seeing an increase in plastic waste consumption. While earlier in January,…

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Today, 7.8 billion people celebrate the World Environment Day amidst circumstances that are far rare and different from anything we’ve been through − we have been massively hit by a pandemic, the economy faces a sharp slowdown, swarms of locusts have destroyed food crops in the Middle East, the horn of Africa and many states in India, fires have burnt down million hectares of forests worldwide, ocean temperatures are rising and cyclones have become frequent and fierce destroying cities in a matter of hours and impacting urban services and infrastructure. Our rivers and oceans have become a plastic soup, many…

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Today, as the entire world is fighting the war against COVID-19, one debate has constantly risen. How will the developing world shape up over this period? One thing has clearly emerged as our cities and systems fight this pandemic: we need better sanitation services – both solid and liquid waste management as much as we need effective health care systems. By 2050, two thirds of us will live in cities. However, our urban centres are grappling with the effects of our current take-make-waste economy. Under this linear system, cities consume over 75 per cent of natural resources, produce over 50…

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