Every morning, before most of Sambalpur city stirs, Sunita Pradhan is already on her rounds.
She moves through the city’s lanes in a waste collection vehicle, stopping at homes to collect segregated garbage. Wet waste goes into one section. Dry waste into another. Along the route, residents greet her by name.
A few years ago, Sunita worked as a daily wage labourer. Today, she is a Swachha Sathi — a sanitation worker, community educator, and, in a very real sense, one of the people keeping a mid-sized Odishan city from drowning in its own garbage.
And making it richer in the process.
Sambalpur Municipal Corporation (SMC) is generating around Rs 20 lakh every single month from waste — compost sold to farmers, recyclables sold to vendors, and materials recovered at its network of ‘Wealth Centres’.
The city reportedly processes more than 170 metric tonnes of waste every day across nine decentralised Wealth Centres. Most of the revenue comes from dry recyclable waste, while compost sales contribute a much smaller share.
It is not a pilot or a startup. It is a functioning, replicable urban system built on deceptively simple logic: stop seeing waste as a problem to be buried, and start treating it as a resource to be sorted.
How Sambalpur’s wealth centres work
At the heart of SMC’s system are its Wealth Centres — decentralised facilities where collected waste is segregated, processed, and converted into sellable material. Wet organic waste is composted into ‘Mo-khata’, a high-quality organic fertiliser that has found a steady market among local farmers and nurseries.
Women from Mission Shakti self-help groups manage waste segregation, composting and recycling operations at ward-level Wealth Centres. Photograph: (Facebook/@SMCSambalpur)
According to officials, recyclable materials generate nearly Rs 18 lakh to Rs 19 lakh every month, while Mo Khata compost contributes another Rs 45,000 to Rs 50,000 through retail and bulk sales.
Dry recyclables — plastics, metals, paper, glass — are sorted and sold to registered vendors and recyclers. Some low-value plastic waste is also supplied to cement factories, where it is used as alternative fuel. What cannot be composted or recycled is minimised, and what remains is processed rather than simply sent to the landfill.
The centres are not large infrastructure projects requiring crores in capital. They are lean, ward-level facilities that can be set up with relatively modest investment — making them deployable in cities of almost any size.
The women who make it work
The engine of the entire model is its human infrastructure. Across Odisha, over 2,100 Swachha Sathis and 485 Swachha Supervisors drawn from Mission Shakti self-help groups are engaged in waste collection and management, with over 1,785 workers specifically operating Wealth Centres.
Mission Shakti is Odisha’s statewide women’s self-help group network, which today supports several community-led government programmes. Within the waste management system, Swachha Sathis handle door-to-door collection, segregation awareness and processing operations, while Swachha Supervisors help coordinate collection routes and centre-level activities.
In Sambalpur, these women do far more than collect garbage. They help spread segregation awareness in neighbourhoods, encourage households to separate wet and dry waste correctly, and build the trust that makes the system work street by street.
t a Sambalpur Wealth Centre, workers sort recyclable materials like plastic, paper, metal and glass for resale to vendors. Photograph: (Facebook/@SMCSambalpur)
Without segregation at the point of generation, none of the downstream economics work. And without these women showing up every day, segregation does not happen.
The model also does something politically important: it converts what was once informal, invisible, and uncompensated labour — waste-picking, typically done by the most marginalised — into formal employment with fixed wages and social recognition.
Why it works: The blueprint
Sambalpur’s model rests on four replicable pillars.
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First, mandatory source segregation — residents separate wet and dry waste before collection, which dramatically increases the quality and value of recovered materials.
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Second, door-to-door collection on fixed routes with GPS-tracked vehicles, reducing dumping and increasing coverage.
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Third, decentralised processing at Wealth Centres rather than one distant mega-facility, which cuts transportation costs and speeds up the composting cycle. Processing waste closer to where it is generated also reduces transportation costs and prevents large volumes of mixed waste from piling up at a single dumping site.
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Fourth, SHG-led operations — women’s self-help groups run the centres, with their labour not only providing livelihoods but also embedding accountability and community ownership into the system.
Wet waste collected from households is processed into ‘Mo Khata’ compost at decentralised Wealth Centres across Sambalpur. Photograph: (Facebook/@SMCSambalpur)
This is not rocket science. It is systems thinking applied to a problem every Indian city shares.
India generates roughly 62 million tonnes of municipal solid waste every year, and urban waste generation is projected to more than double by 2030.
Most of it is still mixed, dumped, and lost. A 2021 government estimate put the revenue potential of recyclable municipal waste alone at Rs 30,000 crore annually — a number that currently evaporates into landfills.
Sambalpur is a proof-of-concept that this doesn’t have to be so.
Why this matters for Indian cities
What makes Sambalpur’s story worth telling loudly is precisely that it is not exceptional in its resources. It is exceptional in its execution. It is a Tier-2 city in western Odisha — not a metro with unlimited budgets, not a showcase Smart City with foreign consultants. It is a regular Indian city that decided, methodically, to fix one thing.
In 2023, reports suggested SMC was earning around Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 2 lakh every month from recyclable waste. The current figures show how quickly recovery systems can scale when segregation improves.
Swachha Sathis conduct awareness drives in neighbourhoods, encouraging residents to separate waste at source before collection. Photograph: (Facebook/@SMCSambalpur)
Sunita Pradhan’s morning rounds are not just sanitation. They represent sanitation, livelihoods and local economics moving together. They are proof that the cleanest cities of the future won’t be the ones that can afford to hide their garbage best, but the ones that finally learn to value it.
The blueprint exists. The question is which city is next.
