COVID-19 and waste management policy practices in India: a systematic review

The second most populous country in the world, India, is severely facing challenges in managing increased amounts of solid and bio-medical wastes leading to associated physical and health hazards. The Government of India (GoI) has launched and modified different policies regarding the handling and management of solid, bio-medical and plastic wastes since independence to deal with the changing waste scenario of the country. However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country since early 2020, inadequacies of municipal solid waste management (MSWM), bio-medical waste management (BMWM), and plastic waste management policies have occurred with personal protective equipment (PPE) kits, such as facemasks, face shields, gloves, gowns, sanitizer bottles, and remnants of packaging goods from online shopping, putting the waste economy and ecology under further pressure. This article provides a systematic review of literature on the Indian SWM practices during COVID-19 within the larger context of the existing Indian MSWM, BMWM, and plastic waste management policies. Finally, we suggest ways by which the waste scenario can be tackled during cycles of crises including outbreaks of pandemics in the future. We advocate for involving multiple stakeholders like solid-waste management (SWM) officials, local community members, i.e., citizens, ragpickers, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) along with the deployment of different disposal methods, such as biomethanation, pyrolysis, etc. in designing effective and efficient policies and actions. We believe that these sets of recommendations have scalability, especially in managing COVID-19-Associated Waste (CAW) in the global South.