Solving Our Problems with Creativity

I am proud to call myself Bangalore boy. That is precisely why I find it increasingly difficult to understand how Bengaluru was once described as the Garden City of India.

I love this city. I love its history, its culture, its people, its architecture, its lakes, its trees and the extraordinary energy that has made it one of India's most important cities. Bengaluru has an identity that is genuinely unique.

But we are slowly losing much of what made this city special.

Garbage and littering are perhaps the most visible manifestations of that decline. Walk through almost any part of Bengaluru and it is difficult to avoid seeing plastic, food waste, construction debris and discarded material accumulating in places where it simply should not be.

I am glad to see some movement on the issue. Whether every new initiative is driven by genuine civic concern or political necessity is impossible for me to know, but I am willing to be optimistic. Recently, while reading the Deccan Herald, I came across its Citizen Connect: For a Better Bengaluru initiative, through which residents can report public health and environmental threats, including unauthorised dumping in drains, lakes and roads.

I think this is an excellent idea.

There are also a growing number of apps, platforms and civic initiatives attempting to make citizens more involved in the management of their own city. In theory, that should be enough. If a city has millions of educated, employed and reasonably prosperous citizens who care about Bengaluru, surely we should be able to keep it clean.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a utopia.

Some people care deeply about the city. Some care only when a problem affects them personally. Some simply do not care at all. And some actively contribute to the problem by littering, dumping waste or treating public spaces as if they belong to nobody.

This is where I think we need to stop relying exclusively on civic virtue and start thinking about incentives.

Look at Bengaluru's lakes. The city has lost or severely damaged numerous lakes and wetlands over decades through encroachment, pollution, infrastructure development and poor planning. Some water bodies have been encroached upon or fragmented to accommodate roads, residential development and commercial projects.

The contradiction is extraordinary.

Bengaluru's natural landscape is one of the things that made the city desirable in the first place. Its lakes, trees, wetlands and green spaces are not merely decorative. They provide ecological, hydrological and recreational benefits. And yet, as the city grew, we repeatedly treated these natural assets as obstacles to development rather than assets worth protecting.

Why? There is an obvious answer.

Profit.

We have increasingly built a culture in which almost everything is evaluated according to its immediate economic value.

A lake is worth more as a piece of developable land. A tree is worth more when the space beneath it can become a road. A public space is worth more when it can become commercial property.

The long-term environmental value of something is difficult to put on a balance sheet. The short-term financial value is not. This is why I had what I think is an interesting idea: use what everyone loves to solve what everyone hates.

Money.

Bengaluru has a garbage problem. It also has a large informal workforce and people who struggle to access stable employment because they lack education, qualifications, documentation, social networks or simply opportunity. It has a population that frequently complains about dirty streets. And it has an enormous amount of waste that has economic value if properly collected and segregated.

Why not connect these problems?

Create a system in which the government, municipality or an authorised public-private mechanism pays people a reasonable amount for collecting waste from designated public areas and delivering it to authorised collection and segregation centres. In other words:

You clean the city. We pay you.

It sounds almost absurdly simple. Perhaps that is precisely why it is worth considering.

There is, however, an important point I should acknowledge before anyone accuses me of reinventing the wheel. I am not suggesting that Bengaluru has never attempted to connect waste management with employment. In fact, there are already organisations doing precisely this, and that is one of the reasons I think the underlying principle deserves far more attention.

Organisations such as Hasiru Dala have spent years working with informal waste pickers in Bengaluru, helping integrate them into the city's formal waste-management ecosystem and advocating for their recognition as legitimate workers rather than treating them as an invisible underclass. Bengaluru's Dry Waste Collection Centres have also created a decentralised system through which dry waste can be collected, sorted and channelled towards recycling and other forms of recovery.

This matters because it demonstrates something important.

The idea that waste management can simultaneously be an environmental intervention and a source of livelihood is not theoretical. Bengaluru is already doing it, albeit on a very different scale and in a very different form.

Nor is the idea of rewarding people for collecting litter unheard of elsewhere in India. Since 2019, the municipal corporation in Ambikapur, Chhattisgarh, has run a "Garbage Café" that offers a full meal in exchange for a kilogram of plastic waste. If a small city can make that work, Bengaluru can certainly think bigger.

And Bengaluru should build on what it already has. The people who collect waste are not the problem. The people who sort recyclable material are not the problem. The existence of an informal waste economy is not the problem. The problem is that we have historically been very good at benefiting from the labour of these people while being remarkably poor at recognising, protecting and fairly compensating them.

A person who spends their day collecting recyclable material from our streets is performing a service that has economic and environmental value. The fact that we have traditionally regarded that person as somehow socially inferior says considerably more about us than it does about them.

But I think we can go one step further.

The existing model largely concerns people already participating in the waste-management ecosystem. My question is: what about the enormous quantity of waste that is already sitting illegally on our roads, in our drains, around our lakes and in our public spaces?

Who is incentivised to remove that?

The municipal worker? Perhaps.

The contractor? Sometimes.

The concerned citizen? Occasionally.

But what if we created a system in which anyone willing to do it could participate? Not by simply handing someone money for picking up a random bag of garbage. That would be an invitation to fraud. Instead, create a verified system. Collect waste from designated public areas. Take it to an authorised collection point. Weigh it. Record it. Segregate it. Dispose of or recycle it appropriately. And then pay the person who did the work.

Collect. Verify. Pay.

That would not replace Bengaluru's existing waste workers or organisations such as Hasiru Dala. It would complement them. In fact, I would argue that the people already doing this work should be among the first beneficiaries. They already possess the knowledge, networks and experience required to make such a system work. Instead of designing a new system from the perspective of a bureaucrat sitting in an office, perhaps we should ask the people who already spend their lives dealing with our waste what would actually work on the ground.

The point is not to reinvent Bengaluru's waste-management system. It is to ask whether we can extend what already works to address what currently does not. There is a huge difference between saying "we should pay people to collect garbage" and saying "we already know that waste can create livelihoods; can we design a transparent incentive mechanism that extends that economic value to the enormous amount of litter currently abandoned in our public spaces?"

The second proposition, I think, is considerably harder to dismiss. And perhaps that is the lesson here. Good policy does not always require inventing something entirely new. Sometimes it requires looking at what is already working, asking why it works, identifying what it does not solve, and then having the imagination to take it one step further.

This is not a proposal to replace Bengaluru's sanitation workers. Nor is it an argument that anyone should be encouraged to rummage through hazardous waste without protection.

It would be a voluntary, low-barrier civic employment programme operating alongside the existing waste-management system.

Someone who has no formal qualification but needs an income could participate. Someone who currently survives through begging could have another option. Someone who is unemployed could earn money while performing a socially useful service. Someone who already collects recyclable material informally could potentially enter a more formal and safer system. And the city benefits simultaneously.

The important point is that this should not simply become "₹X per kilogram of garbage."

That would create enormous opportunities for abuse. People could move waste from one location to another. People could deliberately create waste. Organised groups could monopolise collection points. Heavy materials could distort the incentive. Hazardous waste could create serious health risks.

The system therefore needs to reward verified collection and proper disposal or segregation, not merely weight.

Imagine something like this:

A registered worker is assigned or permitted to collect waste from designated public areas.

The material is taken to an authorised collection point.

It is weighed using a publicly visible digital system.

The category and weight of the material are recorded.

The waste is then sent for appropriate recycling, processing or disposal.

The worker receives the corresponding payment directly.

No middleman.

No cash changing hands behind a municipal office.

No contractor deciding how much someone deserves.

No official quietly pocketing a percentage.

Collect. Verify. Pay.

And because corruption is one of the biggest risks to any government programme in India, the system should be designed around transparency from the beginning. Every ward could have publicly accessible data showing the quantity of waste collected, the number of participating workers, the amount paid and the destination of the collected material. If Ward 42 collected 20 tonnes of waste and paid ₹X lakh for it, citizens should be able to see that. If the numbers do not add up, someone should be able to ask why. Technology cannot eliminate corruption. But it can make certain forms of corruption considerably more difficult to hide.

There is another important reason I think this could work.

People respond to incentives.

We already understand this everywhere else. We pay people to manufacture things. We pay people to transport things. We pay people to build things. We pay people to repair things. We pay people to deliver things. Why do we find it so strange to pay people to improve the physical environment around us? There is something almost ideological about the assumption that civic responsibility must always be motivated by civic virtue. It need not. You do not need everyone to suddenly become passionate environmentalists. You need the incentive structure to make doing the right thing worthwhile. That is the point.

I am not naïve enough to believe that this would solve Bengaluru's waste problem. It would not.

Waste segregation at source would still matter. Door-to-door collection would still matter. Recycling infrastructure would still matter. Enforcement against illegal dumping would still matter. Producer responsibility would still matter. Public awareness would still matter.

The existing sanitation workforce would still matter enormously. This would simply add another tool to the toolbox. And perhaps we should be more willing to experiment with unconventional tools. We frequently discuss unemployment and poverty as if they exist independently of our urban problems. They don't.

There are people who desperately need income. There are public spaces that desperately need cleaning. There are materials lying on our streets that have economic value. There is a municipal system that already spends enormous amounts of money managing waste.

Why not design a system that connects these realities?

I can already imagine the objections.

"Why would anyone collect garbage from the road for a few hundred rupees?"

The question itself demonstrates a degree of privilege.

Why would someone beg on the side of the road? Why would someone spend hours collecting recyclable material from rubbish? Why would someone accept dangerous, exhausting and socially stigmatised work?

Because they need money.

People do not always have the luxury of choosing between dignified and undignified employment. They choose between earning something and earning nothing. And I would much rather live in a society where someone who has no other opportunity can earn an honest income by performing a useful public service than one where that same person is forced to sit on a pavement and beg for enough money to feed their family.

There is nothing undignified about honest work. What is undignified is creating a society in which a person is given no meaningful avenue to work and then judging them for being poor. Of course, there are enormous challenges.

Scale: Bengaluru is not a small town where ten municipal officials can personally monitor every collection point.

Administration: Who registers the workers? Who verifies the waste? Who determines the rates? Who audits the payments?

Mafia-isation: Any system involving large amounts of money and a fragmented informal workforce can attract organised intermediaries who attempt to control access.

Existing vested interests: Waste management is already an ecosystem involving contractors, recyclers, informal waste pickers and other stakeholders. A new programme cannot simply pretend that none of these people exist.

And then there is my greatest concern.

Bureaucratic greed: I can imagine an otherwise brilliant scheme being destroyed by the people administering it.

A worker collects 100 kilograms. The official system records 80. The worker is promised ₹10 per kilogram but receives ₹6. The remaining ₹4 disappears into some administrative black hole.

A contractor gets the contract to operate the collection centres. The contractor appoints another contractor. The second contractor appoints a supervisor. And suddenly the person actually doing the work receives the smallest share of the money.

This is how good ideas die. Not necessarily because the idea was bad. Because too many people discovered that there was money to be made between the idea and the person it was supposed to help. That is why the architecture matters as much as the idea.

If Bengaluru ever attempted something like this, I would want direct payments wherever possible, publicly auditable weighing systems, independent audits, clear grievance mechanisms and transparent ward-level reporting. Most importantly, the worker should not be dependent on a single contractor for their livelihood. The system should belong to the city, not to a new class of middlemen.

There is also a broader philosophical point here. We often talk about poverty alleviation and environmental protection as two completely separate policy areas. Why?

Why can't environmental improvement itself become a source of economic opportunity? Why can't cleaning lakes create employment? Why can't restoring public spaces create employment? Why can't maintaining urban greenery create employment? Why can't removing illegal dumping create employment? Why can't protecting public infrastructure create employment? We are accustomed to thinking of government expenditure as a cost.

Sometimes it is. But sometimes the question should be:

What value are we receiving in return for that expenditure?

If the government spends ₹100 on a programme that simultaneously creates income for a poor citizen, removes waste from a public road, diverts recyclable material from a landfill and improves the health and appearance of the city, perhaps that ₹100 is not merely expenditure. Perhaps it is an investment.

And this brings me back to the larger problem. I do not think Bengaluru is doomed.

In fact, I think the opposite. Bengaluru has enormous advantages. It has talent, capital, universities, technology companies, entrepreneurs, civil-society organisations and an unusually large population of people who genuinely care about the city.

What it lacks is not intelligence. It is often execution. We are very good at identifying problems. We are very good at complaining about problems. We are very good at arguing about who caused problems. We are considerably worse at designing systems that make solving those problems easier. That is what needs to change.

We should stop assuming that every solution has to come from political brilliance. Sometimes it can come from an incentive. Sometimes it can come from technology. Sometimes it can come from a local experiment. Sometimes it can come from asking a deceptively simple question:

What does everyone already want, and how can we use that desire to solve something nobody wants?

Everyone wants money. Nobody wants garbage. So let's make cleaning garbage financially worthwhile. Perhaps it won't work. Perhaps the economics won't scale. Perhaps the administration will be too complicated. Perhaps it will be abused. Perhaps the amount paid will be insufficient to attract participants. Perhaps it will be unexpectedly successful.

But the answer to an unconventional idea should not automatically be "That won't work."

The answer should be: "What would have to be true for this to work?"

That is how we should approach public policy. Experiment. Measure. Audit. Improve. Scale what works. Kill what doesn't.

My criticism of Bengaluru comes precisely from the fact that I love Bengaluru. My criticism of India comes precisely from the fact that I want India to be better. Our frustration is not necessarily born from pessimism. Sometimes it is born from hope that has become impatient. And that is why I am so interested in ideas like this.

I do not expect one waste-collection incentive scheme to save Bengaluru. I expect almost nothing to work perfectly the first time. But I would rather live in a city that experiments with ten unconventional ideas, measures them honestly, admits when seven fail and improves the three that work than a city that spends ten years discussing why none of them are possible. Because the greatest obstacle to progress is not always a lack of resources. Sometimes it is a lack of imagination.

We have problems. We have people who need opportunities. We have resources being wasted. We have technology capable of tracking transactions. We have millions of citizens who want their city to improve. So why not connect these things?

Maybe the solution to some of our problems does not require another grand speech, another committee or another slogan. Maybe it requires us to think a little differently. Because the most dangerous assumption in public policy is that the only solutions available to us are the ones we have already tried. And if Bengaluru is genuinely going to become a better city, we need fewer people asking: "Whose fault is this?"

And more people asking: "What can we do about it?"

That is where creativity begins. And, occasionally, creativity is exactly what governance needs.

OPEN YOUR MINDS.