The last two years at Socratus Foundation for Collective Wisdom have changed how I understand urban waste and systems change.
We began with a deceptively simple question:
If India has strong policies, committed communities, and growing innovation in waste, why does scale remain so elusive?
Sitting with that question led us away from quick fixes and into deeper inquiry. Waste, we realised again and again, is not a technical problem. It is a wicked problem shaped by relationships, power, markets, behaviours, and meaning. You cannot solve it linearly.
Starting in 2023–24, our Urban Systems Lab took an ecosystem approach, recognising that national policy has scale power, but adoption lives in messy local realities. Through partnerships anchored in Swachh Bharat Mission–Urban, MoHUA, with support from Rainmatter Foundation and alongside the ClimateRISE Alliance, we created spaces to think together, not advocate, not pitch, but make sense.
Three national working groups emerged:
Markets & innovation adoption, civic initiatives, and communications & narratives. Across interviews, city conversations, startup mappings, and convenings, a pattern surfaced. Weak segregation, inconsistent MRF performance, fragmented governance, fragile financing, and EPR uncertainty weren’t isolated failures; they were reinforcing loops.
What stayed with me most was this: progress happened not when we introduced “solutions,” but when unlikely actors sat together long enough to build shared language and trust. Entrepreneurs are listening to municipalities. Civil society engaging markets. Data meets lived experience. Today, with extensive insights and a few data indicators across cities, we work to translate these into system simulations with our partner, Desta.
This journey has been less about building projects and more about cultivating relationships, insights, and institutional confidence. It has reaffirmed our belief that scaling climate-resilient urban systems is as much a governance and narrative challenge as it is an infrastructure one.
As we move forward, I remain hopeful because when systems are understood relationally and when people learn together, even the most wicked problems can begin to shift.