Mr. Abhijit Aawari will present his MDP presentation as per the details below:

Date: 7th July 2026

Time: 1000 – 1100 hrs.

Venue: C-TARA Conference Room No.1

Title: How different stakeholders perceive solid waste management governance: A study of Mumbai 

Supervisor: Professor Kuru Dindi

Examiners:

- Prof. Sanjay Chahande, C-TARA, IITB

- Mr Vaibhav Awachar, Solid Waste Management Dept, BMC, Mumbai

Abstract:

Municipal solid waste management in India has been governed by three successive regulatory regimes since 2000, each expanding the obligations placed on urban local bodies, waste generators, and citizens. The literature on SWM governance consistently identifies a gap between regulatory mandate and ground-level implementation, attributing it to institutional capacity constraints, incomplete integration of the informal sector, and uneven citizen participation. Independent evidence supports this: a national performance audit, national compliance data, and a Supreme Court judgment each separately found that what the system reports about itself does not reliably match what verification finds.

This study argues that this gap has a perceptual dimension that existing frameworks do not capture: stakeholders at different positions within the same governance system may perceive its quality differently, in ways shaped by what each position allows them to directly verify. To examine this, an exploratory mixed-methods study was conducted in Mumbai, surveying 42 purposively sampled respondents across three stakeholder groups ward-level implementers (n=9), practitioner-consultants (n=18), and citizens (n=15) using a structured instrument built on four governance dimensions, supplemented by open-ended responses analysed through thematic coding.

Three results stand out. Ward-level officers rated governance quality most favourably, but their confidence was concentrated on matters within their own operational sphere. Practitioner-consultants recorded the study's lowest single score on whether official compliance data reflects ground reality. All three groups converged only on efficiency, the one dimension directly observable from every position. An adapted analytical framework the Position Based Perception Framework, developed by extending street-level bureaucracy theory and the multi-level linkages perspective accounts for this pattern: perception tracks what each position can verify.

The findings support designing SWM monitoring around multi-tier verification rather than single-tier self-reporting, a direction the Supreme Court's February 2026 judgment has mandated nationally, and offer a testable framework for examining governance perception in other cities and policy domains.

Keywords: solid waste management, governance perception, Mumbai, multi-level governance;