South Asia — 2028
India
Research question
What has India already worked out that the rest of the world could use — and which international models survive contact with Indian conditions?
Written before the mission, and published unchanged. Findings are assessed against this question rather than the question being rewritten to fit the findings.
Research scope
A research destination in its own right
What we want to understand
- 01What the informal recovery sector already does well, before anything is redesigned around it.
- 02Which Indian city-level models have held for a decade, and what kept them running.
- 03How municipal finance constrains what a city can operate over ten years.
- 04What varies most between Indian cities, and what is genuinely common.
- 05Where existing rules already allow the change, so the gap is implementation rather than policy.
- 06What has already been tried in India and did not hold, and why.
- Region
- South Asia
- Research lens
- 04 · India as a research destinationWhat has India already worked out, and what can India share?
- Research theme
- What India has already worked out, and what it still has to solve
- Field research
- Planned for 2028
- Framework themes
Cities
Indore
Sustained household segregation across a large city over many years. The question worth answering is not that it happened but what kept it running after the launch attention ended.
Ambikapur
A small-city model built around decentralised sorting centres and organised sanitation workers, operated without heavy capital equipment.
Surat
A dense industrial and textile economy where commercial and industrial streams dominate the municipal picture.
Pune
Collection delivered through a cooperative of waste-pickers working under agreement with the municipality — formalisation that kept the incumbent workforce rather than replacing it.
Bengaluru
Rapid growth, bulk-generator rules and decentralised organic processing, alongside a large technology sector applying itself to collection logistics.
Mysuru
Ward-level segregation and composting maintained consistently over a long period in a mid-sized city.
Ahmedabad
Large-scale municipal operations combined with legacy landfill remediation, and a long-running informal recovery economy.
Missions
Findings
No findings yet
Field research in India is research planned. This section stays empty until there is something we have actually seen. The questions above are what we will be asking.
What India could take from India
Assessment pending
Any judgement about transfer to India would be speculation until the system has been seen working, and its costs and dependencies understood. Anything published here will be labelled as a proposal until a pilot reports.
What India could take from India
Nothing has been researched yet, so nothing is claimed. These are the parts of India’s experience we expect to be worth putting in front of practitioners here, and what we will ask them about.
- Municipal systems operating at a scale few countries have attempted.
- Source-segregation programmes sustained across millions of households.
- Informal-sector recovery networks that recycle material a formal system would land-fill.
- Low-cost innovations developed under real financial constraint.
- City-level experimentation across widely varying conditions in one country.
Read the reasoning on why this is a two-way journey.
Case studies
No case studies yet
Case studies are published from field research, with sources and limitations.
Film and clips
Notices
Organizations and experts
Directory not yet open
We list an organization only once it has agreed to a public listing, and a person only with their consent. Outreach for this mission is under way; entries appear here as permissions come back.Take part