The Perspective

Opening

My early professional years were rooted in community development and social equity, working at the grassroots level on child rights and skills development programs across rural Rajasthan. That grounding continues to shape how I approach sustainability today, not as an abstract goal, but as a system that must work for people, institutions and markets simultaneously. Later years of my professional life, till date, are spent working inside systems that are expected to perform under imperfect conditions; limited budgets, fragmented governance, informal labour and inconsistent enforcement.

Recycling in India operates at this exact intersection.

Why Infrastructure, Not Advocacy

Public discourse around waste often focuses on behaviour change or environmental awareness. These matter, but they are insufficient.

Without reliable infrastructure, even well-intentioned systems collapse. Collection fails. Segregation erodes. Informal workers remain excluded. Materials leak back into landfills.

My work has focused on building and testing infrastructure that acknowledges these realities rather than working around them.

On Informality

India’s informal waste economy is often described as a problem to be solved.

In reality, it is one of the most resilient recycling systems in the world, just poorly integrated into formal planning. Designing systems that recognise informal workers as participants, not afterthoughts, is essential to scale, equity and long term resilience.

How I Think About Scale

Pilot projects succeed easily. Systems scale painfully. Most systems fail not because they are wrong, but because they underestimate complexity. Scale requires:

• Economic viability
• Institutional adoption
• Behavioural alignment
• Operational discipline