India doesn’t know how to manage its waste. The solid waste management (SWM) rules notified in 2016 clearly spell out how best to segregate and manage urban solid waste at the source to ensure minimum dumping in landfills. But hardly any municipalities have bothered to enforce these rules, and the urban waste crisis in many cities has reached “explosive” dimensions. “The simple task of enforcing segregation of waste at the source, a standard practice in much of Europe, has become a very complex problem in India. There is a need to transform social behaviour towards waste. There is also a need to push civic and regulatory systems out of their inertia. Or we will only burden future generations with the toxic impacts of our waste,” says Leo Saldanha of Environment Support Group.