Jammu, May 4 -- Walk into Gandhi Nagar on a weekday morning and the streets are swept clean by seven o'clock. Drive fifteen minutes south to Narwal or Gangyal, and the picture is completely different heaps of black polythene bags piled against compound walls, drain mouths clogged with vegetable scraps, the smell unmistakable even before you turn the corner. Same city. Different worlds.
Jammu generates somewhere between 350 and 400 metric tonnes of solid waste every single day. Roughly 0.45 kilograms per person, per day a figure that has crept steadily upward as the city has grown. The problem is not just volume. It is where those waste ends up, and who is left to deal with it.
A 2020 assessment published in a peer-reviewed journal put a s...