Proceedings of the International Conference on Sustainable Solid Waste Management, 5 - 7 September 2007, Chennai, India. pp.504-507 504 Community Participation through Information, Education, Communication and Capacity Building of ULB for Solid Waste Management Gurdeep Singh 1 , Tauseef Zia Siddiqui 2 and Anshul Jain 3 1 Centre of Mining Environment, 2 Environmental Science and Engineering, 3 Mining Engineering Indian School of Mines (ISM) University, Dhanbad (Jharkhand) Email: anshul_ism@yahoo.co.in ABSTRACT Community participation is the process by which individuals and families understand responsibility for their own health and welfare of societies. Communities should be motivated enough to solve their common problems themselves. This enables them to become agents of their own development instead of positive beneficiaries of development aid. The key to the success of solid waste management system in any city is the cooperation of citizens. Citizens ought to be involved in proper storage, collection and safe disposal of waste. Community should also be made aware of health risks associated with improper solid waste management. The existing management of solid wastes in India depends completely on municipality services, which eventually led into the scenario of solid waste disposal as only government’s responsibility. But, with a rapidly growing urban population, current institutions are unable to provide an adequate level of services, posing a serious threat to public health and environment. The waste is just dumped at such sites and remains littered/unattended causing unhygienic conditions, foul smell, environmental pollution, unsightly appearance etc. Consequently, vulnerable group/direct stakeholders are at much higher risk of communicable and non-communicable diseases. Hence, it is essential for the success of SWM project to understand the requirement of public participation and support. In the past there have been no major efforts to create community awareness for citizens, which is a vital component of solid waste management system. The community participation can be strengthen through multidisciplinary nature of Information, Education and Communication (IEC) for the citizens one side and Capacity Building Programs for the ULB officials & staff another side. Keywords: SWM, community participation, education, capacity building 1.0 INTRODUCTION There has been a significant increase in municipal solid waste management (MSW) generation in India in last few years. This is because of the rapid growth of population and per capita waste generation. Per capita waste generation in Indian cities lies between 0.2 to 0.5 kg/day. Presently, the systems are assuming larger importance due to population explosion in municipal areas, emergence of newer technologies and rising public awareness towards cleanliness (Kumar et al., 2004). The average collection efficiency for MSW in Indian cities is about 72.5% and around 70% of the cities lack