DTE multimedia team wins Ramnath Goenka Award for reporting on India’s waste management solutions

The Down To Earth multimedia team has been awarded the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award, 2022 on March 19, 2024 by the Indian Express Group for Environment, Science and Technology Reporting in ‘Broadcast Digital’ category. The organisation has been recognised for its video series on India’s cleanest cities.

The nine-episode docu-series showcased nine cities which adopted exemplary and unique solid waste management strategies that helped reduce the burden of legacy waste and streamline collection, segregation and treatment of municipal solid waste.  

Check out the entire series: Cleanest cities of India | How cities have resolved their garbage management problem

These cities are a learning laboratory and their success story needs to be heard, witnessed and showcased to reach the people. These models need to be replicated to help other cities give a new direction to their waste management future, especially at a time when more and more Indians are moving to urban areas: 35 per cent now live in cities, up from 28 per cent in 2001.

Currently, urban India generates around 65 million tonnes of municipal solid waste annually. It is predicted that this volume will increase to 165 million tonnes by 2030! But, there is good news.

India’s solid waste management strategy is now designed for material recovery and reuse. It is an approach towards a truly circular economy. This will make policy and practice even more environment-friendly as it will demand full re-utilisation of materials and no waste. Twenty-eight cities across the country are following this newly designed strategy. 

‘The Cleanest Cities of India’ docuseries started with identification and documentation of nine thematic areas of waste management and model cities falling under each of these themes:

Source segregation – Indore, Madhya Pradesh
Sanitary waste – Karad, Maharashtra
Organic biodegradable waste – Mysuru, Karnataka
Plastic waste – Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu
E-waste – Jamshedpur (Jharkhand) 
Landfill management – Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh
Technological innovations – Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh
Material processing – Paradip, Odisha
Waste-to-wealth – Dhenkanal, Odisha

Thus, pre-production research was a long and tedious process, especially because this docuseries was a first-of-its-kind and the team had to verify whether each of these cities was adhering to the codes of conduct or not when it came to sustainable waste management. The team visited all the sites involved in the process, right from landfills to the shops where the compost is sold.

This was followed by extensive travel to different parts of the country and meeting the various stakeholders involved in each city. COVID-19 restrictions were still in place during that period which slowed production further. The multimedia team had to plan, travel, shoot, edit and package the nine videos within a period of three months.

There are 7000+ towns and cities in the country. Urban India produces about 42 million tons of municipal solid waste annually, that is, 115,000 metric tonnes per day (TPD), out of which 83,378 TPD is generated in 423 Class-I cities. In spite of this, waste management is still at a nascent stage in India and needs to be demystified.

We have attempted to do this by covering most of the major themes. Since waste is not a widely understood topic, it is even more difficult to package such a series and make it engaging. Despite these obstacles, the series has garnered close to one million views in a year.

Down To Earth Multimedia, at present, is a six-member team (Joel Michael, Sunny Gautam, Midhun Vijayan, KA Shreya, Prabhat Kumar, Dhruval Parekh) with varied expertise. The team is responsible for all the video content on Down To Earth’s youtube channel, Instagram handle and other social media platforms. This includes two-minute new videos published every day, long format stories (10-15 minutes), animated explainers and documentary series. The nine-part waste management docuseries, titled ‘The Cleanest Cities of India’, was produced in 2021 and published in 2022. Back then, the team, headed by Arnab P Dutta, comprised Joel Michael, Adithyan PC, Sunny Gautam, Aishwarya Iyer and Midhun Vijayan.

DTE Multimedia strives to produce and publish content with an investigative and scientific lens. In this process, DTE videos have also been recognised at various film festivals and workshops across the world, including CMS Vatavaran film festival and Vasundhara Kirloskar film festival. In this docuseries, the film on Jamshedpur’s e-waste management received the Urban Climate Crisis Prize at Megacities shortdocs film festival, Paris on 15th December, 2022. Bhopal’s wasteland reclamation film received the honorary trophy at the International Science film festival in 2023.