The New Solid Waste Management Rulebook Has Teeth But is Not the Magic Pill for India’s Waste Crisis

On April 1, 2026, the new Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules 2026 came into force and superseded the SWM rules of 2016 at a time when India continues to rely on open landfills to dispose much of its generated waste – a practice that was banned in the first world decades ago. The country's hill towns and regions drown in waste, courtesy the rush of tourists from the plains who leave behind their bhujia and gutka packets.

The dismal air quality too traces a significant part of its source to the non-recyclable waste like single use and multi-layered plastic that is burned in the open everyday. It is not as if the 2016 MSW rules were not packed with guidelines, but clearly something was amiss that a need was felt for a newer version to replace them one decade later. The new rulebook is eleven pages longer than the previous version and much of the new additions are devoted to the expansion of the definition of responsibilities of various stakeholders and to a new chapter titled “Implementation Framework”.

In the previous version, much of the responsibilities to get India cleaned up was thrusted upon the local bodies (municipalities and panchayats etc.) and a stroke of brevity was used to assign tasks to the higher-ups in the governance ladder. The newer version calls out all the actors of the value chain of waste management and expands their responsibilities, something that is a welcome change. This is also an acknowledgement that the vexed problem of waste management can’t be solved solely from the weak shoulders of local bodies.

The role of every stakeholder of the waste management value chain

The new rules outline the intersectionality of the issue and spell out the role of every stakeholder of the waste management value chain. The importance of this wisdom can’t be emphasised enough, and the fact that this wisdom entered the corridors of power ten years later, offers hope. The duties and responsibilities of Ministry of Housing and Urban development, for instance, are expanded from seven in the older version to twenty-one in the newer version. Similarly, the state pollution boards’ responsibilities and duties are expanded from the eleven to thirty-five.

Even the number of stakeholders handed with a duty sheet as waste generators has expanded to individuals, small units/ shops and bulk waste generators. This distinction was vague in the previous version and therefore lacked specificity of action. This is a much-needed improvement because both the quantum and nature of waste generated differ among different constituencies and that need tailored responses of policies, processes and outcomes.

The new rule book also specifies integrating waste pickers or informal waste collectors into the mainstream process of waste management as the duty of the urban local bodies. Registration of waste pickers and the annual reporting of it is also assigned as the responsibility of the department of urban development and the department responsible for municipal administration/self-governance. There are two million plus invisible citizens as waste pickers of India whose contributions have not only made India achieve best-in-class recycling rates for hard plastic and PET bottles, but also without their visibility and integration no waste management policy can reach fruition. While much more beyond their visibility needs to be spelled out, the fact that the new rulebook acknowledges their role is a start.

The SWM 2016 rules had proposed the formation of the central monitoring committee under the chairpersonship of the secretary of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) that will meet once every year to oversee the implementation of these rules and comprised thirty other members, and none below the rank of the joint secretary and two subject matter experts.

The new rule book proposes the same structure going forward and therefore it is pertinent to ask as to the status update on the minutes of the ten previous meetings and learnings that were garnered from them and incorporated in 2026 rules. The third area, where the new rulebook stands out from the previous version is its stress on the “Implementation Framework” that it sees is needed to deploy these rules on the ground over and above this monitoring committee.

How will the new chapter on “Implementation Framework” in the 2026 version increase the chances of a success ? The new handbook defines four tools for it. The first is the creation of online portals that aims to record, measure and archive stated claims of different stakeholders on these rules. The second is the imposition of environmental compensation for non-compliance on the rules and therefore fines thus collected may become a marker of success or failure of the implementation of these rules. The third is the stress on the reporting of the progress through filing of annual reports by different actors, including bulk waste generators; urban and rural local bodies; and state and central pollution control boards, on their respective ownership on these rules.

The final is the formation of a committee to be constituted by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) under its chairman that will recommend measures to the committee chaired by the secretary of MoEFCC as stated above, on which the second committee should review the progress for effective implementation of these rules. A committee for recommend ways and another committee to review implementation of these rules may sound sardonic but it exposes the extremely vexed issue of implementation that concerns waste management.

There is no other issue in the domain of policy and governance of Indian state that requires thirteen government departments to be brought under one ambit to make it work. The new rulebook states so and may not say it loudly but implies that much of the governance challenges of waste management in India centres around the fact that even somewhat decent rules fall through the cracks and lose steam in the labyrinth of inter-departmental tussles and swops.

Therefore, this emphasis on implementation framework towards it is appreciated, given that the previous rules didn’t lack ideas but were devoid of a multi-pronged stakeholder nudge towards change. For instance, the previous rulebook had laid out a time bound implementation plan of various infrastructure and capacity building initiatives for waste management, but we are way past those deadlines without any neck on the chopping board.

Similarly, in the 2016 SWM rules, there were elaborate guidelines proposed to manage waste in hill regions. The guidelines had proposed user fees from outsiders visiting the area for waste management and prohibited the use of landfills as the method of waste disposal. But on both counts, the state of Uttarakhand failed miserably. What was the action taken for this non-compliance? The new rule book stresses upon the same point and provides a framework of review and monitoring in the hope that this time the state will comply.

But, with such encouraging delta over the previous version, do these new rules offer a high probability of success or will we stand at the same starting point and stare at a version 3.0  after a decade from now? What will happen if such positive conjectures for the newer attempt notwithstanding, respective stakeholders continue to brazen it out with non-compliance or look the other way for one reason or the other.

Take the instance of Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR that was introduced in 2016 and that demanded Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) companies to safely process the plastic waste generated from the packaging they use for their products. How many FMCG companies complied on this framework in the decade gone by ? What was the quantum of waste safely processed by all FMCG companies? Were they made to declare this compliance in annual filings or submit as a necessary document on record in the board meetings?

Curiously, EPR is conspicuous by its absence in the 2026 rule-book, stating that the issue is covered under the Plastic Waste Management Rules of 2024, while much of the waste crisis visible to the naked eye has to do with the single use and multilayer plastic waste generated from the FMCG products that lies littered all over on the highways, ghats, public-spaces and kerbside and in the sewers.

If we read these rules through a pair of eyeballs that are desperate for change and in search for that wonder pill that will solve this crisis with one gulp then the rules will not pass the test. Waste Management in its strictest sense is a state subject and unlike the lucrative subject of taxes that the Union government loves to upstream, this stinky and smelly issue is not an attractive proposition to be appropriated by the establishment-in-supreme. If it was so, then the waste management rules should have shown some boldness to tackle the issue of finances that was the biggest hurdle in the implementation of the 2016 rules.

In the new rule book, how will the head of panchayat arrange for money to implement thirty new duties (main and sub-clauses put together in the new rulebook) when even for hiring a new extra person he has to wait for the funds and approvals by the state government or where will the mayor of an urban local body get the funds to implement fifty-four rules that she is tasked to implement when more than three quarter of her municipality’s money goes into paying for salaries and other routine expenditures ?

Why a tempered reading of the new rules is recommended

A tempered reading of the new rules is thus recommended because India’s current markers on governance of waste management are so low that even a nano-delta change that proposes one committee to supervise the implementation and another committee to recommend measure on which the former committee should monitor the implementation reads like a masterstroke. But, it will not be a bad bet to pin some hope on such focus on delivery and implementation in the new rules with the idea that it may disturb the applecart of complacency, create pressure points in the value chain, push actors to scramble for funds, create guidelines to recruit specialists and build capacities and steers India towards a cleaner outcome.

For the sincere minds, the new rulebook is decently comprehensive that puts together most that is needed for an effective governance of waste management. Minor aberrations aside, it has reasonably defined what needs to be done and how. Though there exist many lacunas but that can be set aside for another day when the current system matures and is able to absorb the next set of reforms. It is now a matter of putting our heads down and just doing it. How the politics and the actors involved in the governance do so should be the measure on which its success should be evaluated a decade from now, notwithstanding the minor discomfort such as foul air, vector outbreaks, soil and water contamination and bio-diversity loss that we’ll experience along the way.

Ankur Bisen is a Senior Partner at  The Knowledge Company, and the author of Wasted: The Messy Story of Sanitation in India, A Manifesto for Change (Pan Macmillan; 2019). The author is on X: @AnkurBisen1

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.