Jammu and Kashmir’s circular economy policy sets ambitious targets for 2035, but the gap between vision and ground reality reveals a region still drowning in its own waste, writes Masood Hussain
Jammu and Kashmir generates 1526 tonnes of municipal solid waste every single day. Besides, it creates 312 tonnes of construction and demolition debris and 457 million litres of wastewater. Then there are nearly 3,500 tonnes of electronic waste every year.
These numbers describe not just a waste crisis but an ‘untapped potential’. The Jammu and Kashmir Circular Economy Policy 2026, initiated by the Housing and Urban Development Department, promises to flip that script entirely: to transform the territory into a zero-waste, resource-efficient region by 2035. The ambition is sweeping. The candour about the obstacles is striking. And the distance between the two is where the real story lives.
The Waste Weight
Of the 1,526 TPD churned out across Jammu and Kashmir’s urban areas, approximately 840 TPD (55%), is organic matter. Another 535 TPD (35%) is dry recyclable waste. Both categories represent recoverable value. Almost none of it is being recovered at scale.
The policy document identifies the core structural problem bluntly: “mixed waste reduces recycling potential.” When wet and dry waste are thrown together, as they routinely are, despite years of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan messaging, the organic fraction contaminates the recyclables, and both end up in landfills or illegal dump sites. The result is a double loss: environmental damage, and the squandering of materials that could have been monetised.
The situation is compounded by seasonal pressure. With huge floating population including tourists, seasonal labour and the massive movement of the security personnel, Jammu and Kashmir is not dealing with a static waste load. During peak tourism periods, waste generation across major circuits spikes to 450-500 TPD.
Seeking a System
The Circular Economy Policy 2026 positions itself as a regulatory and operational overhaul, not merely an aspirational document. It draws its mandate from several national frameworks: the Solid Waste Management Rules of 2016 (updated in January 2026), the Plastic Waste Management Rules of 2016, the Construction & Demolition Waste Management Rules of 2016 (updated in April 2025), the E-Waste Management Rules of 2022, and the Battery Waste Management Rules of 2022.
The policy’s strategic architecture rests on four pillars: Resource Efficiency, Waste-to-Wealth Economy, Digital Monitoring, and Informal Sector Integration. Its targets are time-bound and, on paper, aggressive.
Complete waste segregation is to be achieved by 2026. A 60 per cent reduction in waste sent to landfills is targeted by 2028. Full municipal waste processing is expected by 2030. By 2035, the goal is 100 per cent wastewater reuse for non-potable applications and complete integration of the informal waste workforce.
Not unreasonable by international standards, these targets, however, are being set in a context where the existing infrastructure, enforcement capacity, and market linkages fall far short of what is needed.
The Segregation Gap
The policy treats waste segregation as the linchpin of the entire circular economy. If waste is not separated at source, organic from dry, dry from hazardous, no downstream processing, composting, or recycling is possible. The document reports that segregation has reached approximately 70 per cent across Jammu and Kashmir, largely through the engagement of Self-Help Groups (SHG).
It means that roughly three in every ten households is still mixing their waste. In practical terms, this contamination rate is enough to render an entire Material Recovery Facility’s intake unviable for quality recycling. The policy’s proposed remedies include awareness campaigns, mandatory segregation enforcement; bulk waste generator compliance requirements, and digital tracking of waste collection vehicles. Each of these is necessary. None of them is yet in place at the scale required.
On April 4, 2026, the government informed the assembly it invested Rs 68.14 crore in setting up 2,147 waste segregation sheds in last three years. Right now, however, only 1,491 of them are currently functional.
The Infrastructure Void
The policy makes the starkest confession that recyclables collected are being transported out for recycling. Material Recovery Facilities are described as “being established”, a phrase that signals intent, not completion. The policy identifies “limited recycling infrastructure” and the resulting high logistics cost for recyclables as key gaps.
The government informed the Lok Sabha on December 9, 2024 that Jammu and Kashmir produced 34367.37 tonnes of plastic waste in 2018-19; 74826.33 tonnes in 2019-20; 51710.6 tonnes in 2020-21; 34384 in 2021-22 and 30342 tonnes in 2022-23. In October 2024, the parliament was told that Jammu and Kashmir’s 32 operational Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) have recycled 52.82 per cent of the 146.14 MTs of plastic waste in 2023-24; an increase from 49.95 per cent of the 124.48 MT generated the previous year.
In a report submitted to the National Green Tribunal (NGT), the Pollution Control Committee (JKPCC) claimed that 77.2 MT of plastic waste was recycled in 2023-24, compared to 61.94 MT in 2022-23. Recyclable plastic waste, the assembly was told in April 2026, is sent to Plastic Waste Management Units where it is processed through shredding and baling before being forwarded to authorised recyclers.
The policy proposed solutions are decentralised MRFs, cluster-based recycling zones, and public-private partnership-based recycling infrastructure. The underlying logic is sound: rather than shipping baled plastic and sorted paper hundreds of kilometres to Punjab or Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir should build the processing capacity locally, creating both resource recovery and employment in the process. That requires land, capital, technically skilled contractors, and regulatory clarity on where facilities can be sited.
E-Waste
Of all the waste streams, the e-waste section reads most like an emergency bulletin. Jammu and Kashmir generates approximately 3,500 tonnes of electronic waste annually. There is not a single authorised e-waste recycler operating within the territory. Everything is transported out, at a logistics cost of Rs 10–12 per kilogram that makes the economics of formal recycling deeply unattractive.
What fills the vacuum is informal, unsafe dismantling. The policy identifies Narwal in Jammu and Bemina in Srinagar as sites of informal e-waste processing, operations where workers, typically without protective equipment or training, break apart circuit boards, strip wires, and burn plastics to recover metals, releasing toxic fumes and leaching hazardous materials into soil and groundwater.
The compliance picture is equally grim. The Extended Producer Responsibility framework, which obligates manufacturers to fund the collection and recycling of their end-of-life products, has registered only 14 bulk consumers and six original equipment manufacturers with the Central Pollution Control Board across Jammu and Kashmir. Public awareness of e-waste hazards and disposal options stands at a meagre 15–20 per cent. There is no integrated tracking database.
The policy’s proposed interventions envisaging district-level collection centres, reverse logistics systems, and integration with EPR compliance mechanisms, could, if implemented, unlock an estimated Rs 35–40 crore in resource recovery value while seeding new green enterprises. The path from current reality to that outcome is long and largely unmapped.
Organic Waste
Organic waste, at 840 TPD, represents the single largest component of Jammu and Kashmir’s waste stream. It is also among the most tractable, in theory: organic matter composts, generates biogas through bio-methanation, and can be returned to agricultural soil as fertiliser, reducing dependence on chemical inputs. The policy envisions decentralised composting systems, bio-methanation plants, and mandated processing for bulk waste generators such as hotels, markets, and institutions.
On paper, the inter-departmental linkages are particularly well-conceived. The Agriculture Department is expected to integrate compost use into soil health programmes. The Horticulture Department is to promote compost in orchard fertilisation. Rural Development schemes are to create livelihoods around composting operations. The outcome, the document states, would be a “circular nutrient cycle and reduced fertilizer dependency.”
What the policy does not clearly establish is how this convergence will be achieved in practice, given that inter-departmental coordination in Jammu and Kashmir has historically been one of the most reliable failure points in policy implementation.
Horticulture Residue
One of the more granular and locally specific sections of the policy deals with horticulture residue, the pruning’s, culling’s, and harvest leftovers from Kashmir’s vast apple, pear, and other fruit-growing operations. This is not a small problem. The year end, pruning season and harvest season from September to October together generate bulky biomass surges that overwhelm existing disposal systems.
The current infrastructure for managing this residue consists of just three pilot composting sites, located in Baramulla, Shopian, and Anantnag. Farmers, the policy notes, rarely treat residue as a resource; it is more commonly burned in the fields, contributing to carbon emissions and air quality degradation. Markets for briquettes, compost, or bio-fertilisers made from this residue are weak or non-existent. There is only one briquette unit in Kashmir that caters to a specific clientele of special Hamams and the policy makers are not aware.
The return of the peripheral population to the traditional fuel-wood fired hearths and the mass construction of Hamams has eased a bit of legacy horticulture waste, especially tat coming from orchard pruning’s. This was dictated by the metering of the power department and the tariff hike.
The policy proposes 10,000 compost pits to be created through MGNREGS and the Rural Horticulture Mission, bio-enzyme units from fruit waste, briquette clusters of 5 TPD capacity in Sopore, Shopian, and Udhampur, and linkages to brick kilns, hotels, and institutions as fuel end-users.
The convergence architecture involves HUDD, the Horticulture Department, SKUAST, NABARD, and Agriculture Resource Centres. If it functions, it would deliver additional rural income streams, reduced residue burning, and lower carbon emissions. Three pilot sites and weak markets suggest the policy is starting from close to zero.
Construction Waste
The 312 TPD of construction and demolition waste is, in some ways, the most tractable of Jammu and Kashmir’s waste problems, crushed concrete, brick, stone, and soil can be recycled into aggregates and road-base materials with relatively mature technologies. The policy recognises this potential.
It also identifies the obstacles with unusual directness.
Operational and infrastructure gaps include weak waste estimation, inefficient collection and transport, limited land availability, and inadequate recycling facilities and machinery. Contracting challenges include a shortage of experienced contractors, inconsistent PPP implementation, non-standard contracts, and weak incentive and penalty mechanisms. Financial constraints include chronic under-budgeting, low departmental ownership, and unclear risk-sharing arrangements.
The proposed remedies, penalties, permit suspensions, blacklisting of repeat offenders, GPS tracking, QR-coded permits, and a single accountability chain, address the symptoms. Closing the financial and institutional gaps will require more.
The Wastewater Scandal
The most quietly shocking statistic in the policy is the 457 million litres of wastewater generated daily across Jammu and Kashmir of which only 131 million litres (approximately 29%), is currently treated. The rest flows, largely untreated, into rivers, streams, and the broader environment.
Not merely a circular economy failure, it is a public health and ecological emergency in a region whose rivers and water bodies are both culturally central and economically critical for tourism and agriculture.
The Circular Economy Policy proposes expansion of sewage treatment infrastructure, industrial and agricultural reuse of treated wastewater, and the creation of a Jammu and Kashmir Wastewater Recycling and Reuse Fund. Treated water, the policy envisions, will irrigate crops, supply cooling water to industry, wash roads, maintain golf courses and hotel gardens, and serve as fire-fighting reserves.
The retrofitting cost of existing sewage treatment plants alone is pegged at Rs 30 lakh per million litres per day of capacity, a significant capital requirement on top of an annual O&M cost estimated at Rs 10 per kilolitre, or approximately Rs 166.8 crore per year for full treatment capacity.
The Seasonal Complication
Jammu and Kashmir’s tourism economy is both an opportunity and a complication for circular economy ambitions. The pilgrimage corridors of Vaishno Devi, Amarnath, and others; the valley circuits of Gulmarg, Pahalgam, Doudpathri, and Sonamarg; each generates concentrated, seasonal waste loads that are logistically and politically difficult to manage.
The policy proposes composting and recycling infrastructure in hill stations, plastic restrictions in pilgrimage corridors, promotion of plastic-free zones under a Clean Himalayan Initiative, smart bins, waste-to-wonder installations, and CCTV surveillance integrated with Integrated Command and Control Centres.
Though sensible interventions, their effectiveness will depend on enforcement in remote, high-altitude, and often privately operated spaces, historically one of the most difficult enforcement contexts anywhere.
The Informal Sector
Running beneath the formal waste management system is a parallel economy of rag pickers, scrap dealers, itinerant buyers, and informal recyclers who collectively recover a significant fraction of Jammu and Kashmir’s recyclable waste. They do so without recognition, social protection, or fair compensation, and often in hazardous conditions.
The policy includes a meaningful commitment to integrating this workforce: registration of rag pickers and scrap dealers, SHG-based recycling cooperatives, skill development, and social protection mechanisms. The 550 SHG members who are to receive one lakh rupees per member per year in support, totalling Rs 5.5 crore annually, or Rs 16.5 crore over three years, represent a recognition that circular economy cannot function without the people who are already doing it informally. Whether this process is carried out with their participation and consent, instead of being forced on them, will decide if it helps them or pushes them aside.
The Money Question
The policy’s financial architecture is more detailed than is typical for such documents, and the numbers are instructive. Annual O&M costs for solid waste processing in urban areas are estimated at Rs 222.79 crore, with an additional Rs 55.80 crore for peri-urban areas.
Annual O&M for sewage treatment plants, at full capacity, is estimated at Rs 166.8 crore. Total annual recurring cost is placed at Rs 249 crore. Seventy-eight waste entrepreneurs are to receive one-time support of Rs 10 lakh each, totalling Rs 7.8 crore.
Against this, the Swachh Bharat Mission 2.0 fund allocation is Rs 431.28 crore for solid waste management and Rs 271.67 crore for used water management, figures that suggest the financing gap, on paper, may be bridgeable.
Who Is Responsible?
The draft policy envisages a multi-layered governance framework, with the Housing and Urban Development Department (HUDD) serving as the nodal agency. Urban Local Bodies leading implementation, the Pollution Control Board overseeing compliance, the private sector developing recycling infrastructure, and SHG’s and communities driving resource recovery.
IT Department has proposed a Jammu and Kashmir Digital Waste Management Platform to strengthen tracking and accountability. The Forest and Environment Department has recommended mandatory registration of manufacturers, producers, recyclers and refurbishes on the Central Pollution Control Board’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) portal to address compliance gaps.
However, despite its broad institutional framework, the policy leaves unresolved the question of a clearly empowered lead implementing authority, raising concerns about accountability if targets are not achieved.
The policy’s horizon year is 2035. By then, it envisions Jammu and Kashmir as a model circular economy region in India, with 10,000 green jobs created by 2028 and 25,000 circular livelihoods, reduced landfill dependence, measurable CO₂ emission reductions, and a thriving ecosystem of circular enterprises and recycling industries.
The Circular Economy Policy 2026 names the problems and sets the targets. It identifies the interventions. What it did not guarantee was that the implementing institutions will have the capacity, the coordination, and the sustained political backing to close the vast distance between what Jammu and Kashmir generates and what it is capable of recovering.
A Quick Follow Up
A month after the initial document started circulating with the government departments, the government came with a newer draft, prepared with input from Centre for Innovation and Transformation in Governance (CITaG) of IIM Jammu. By then, the municipal waste tonnage reached 1557 TPD of which 1530 TPD are collected and only 1027 TPD processed. This leaves 530 tons unprocessed approximately 1.8 million tonnes of legacy waste that is lying at more than one hundred dumpsites. While retaining the underlying ambition of the initial draft, the new document attempts rebuilding the machinery around it.
While the initial version leaned on national rule citations, the new one builds a six-pillar framework, Regulatory, Financial, Institutional, Market, Technology, Inclusion, and overlays it with a tiered implementation model. It envisages seven geography-linked clusters, and three fully-funded financial scenarios.
Besides, it benchmarks itself differently. The earlier one looked outward, to Rwanda’s plastic ban and Sikkim’s three-decade clean-state campaign. The newer one looks sideways, to Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab.
The New Architecture
The most structurally significant addition in the new draft is institutional, not technical. Above the existing departmental apparatus, the policy proposes a layered governance stack: an apex steering layer chaired by the Chief Secretary; a “J&K Circular Economy Mission” anchored within HUDD for mission-mode coordination; a “Waste Management SPV” running what the document calls a Sanitation-as-a-Service model; sectoral directorates and divisional review layers; District Circular Economy Cells; ULB-level structures; ward and mohalla community systems; and cluster-level circular economy management units.
The SPV is the new idea. It is a centralised unit delivering pay-per-use waste and sanitation services to Tourist Development Authorities, industry clusters, and peri-urban areas, places that fall outside standard ULB jurisdiction but still generate significant waste loads. The stated purpose is to eliminate the inter-departmental anomalies that have historically stalled implementation in Jammu and Kashmir, by creating a single service provider that can be paid for results rather than relying on a chain of departments each holding partial responsibility.
Tiering the Territory
The second major structural change is a three-tier framework. Every ULB starts at the highest package it can operate reliably, and earns its way upward only after demonstrating segregation, processing, reporting, and offtake readiness.
Tier 1 is meant for remote, hilly, and smaller ULBs. Its expectations are deliberately modest: reduce single-use disposables in municipal spaces, set up ward-level reduce-reuse-recycle centres through SHGs and schools, establish fixed-day dry-waste collection points instead of daily long-haul transport, and maintain something as basic as a paper register or spreadsheet tracking what was collected and dispatched.
Medium ULBs and corridor-linked towns fall in Tier 2. It adds small biogas plants fed by measured market and institutional waste, decentralised aero-bin composting for residential clusters, mini-MRFs with baling and dispatch arrangements, and a requirement to identify bulk waste generators and bring them into compliance.
Jammu and Srinagar cities fall in Tier 3. These are expected to run CBG and bio-methanation plants, dedicated C&D processing facilities, STP-based water reuse for non-potable municipal uses, weighbridge-and-GPS-enabled digital traceability, and bulk generator compliance across hotels, hospitals, markets, and large residential complexes, monitored through a single dashboard.
7 Clusters, 9 Value Chains
The new draft reorganises the entire policy around geography rather than waste category. It names nine priority circular value chains: municipal dry waste, organics and bio-inputs, plastic and packaging, horticulture biomass, tourism and pilgrimage services, C&D material recovery, wastewater reuse, repair and e-waste second-life markets, and a notably new ninth category: silk, handloom, handicraft, and artisan loops, covering remnant use, upcycling, and product-life extension for Kashmir’s craft economy.
These value chains are then mapped onto seven implementation clusters, each tied to a specific geography: a Jammu Metropolitan cluster focused on urban dry waste, C&D, and bulk generator compliance; a Srinagar Valley cluster built around organics and “lake-sensitive circularity”, language that directly acknowledges Dal Lake’s vulnerability to waste leakage; an Apple, Horticulture Biomass and Packaging cluster; a Pilgrimage and Tourism cluster anchored on the Katra-Vaishno Devi axis; an Artisan, Silk, Repair and Upcycling cluster; a Mountain Decentralised Circular Livelihoods cluster for low-haul, low-cost systems in difficult terrain; and an Urban Water Reuse and Sludge-Linked Circularity cluster.
Planners believe that this is where the new framework and the existing ground-level findings line up most usefully, because nearly every gap previously documented sits inside one of these seven boxes.
For the wastewater management, the draft’s funding-window mapping points specifically to AMRUT 2.0 as the financing route for “treated wastewater reuse, sewerage-linked circularity and urban water security”.
For policy identifies GOBARdhan for organic and agri-residue value chains, and PMFME for food waste and micro-processing infrastructure to prevent leaking out of resources through unburned-but-uncomposted biomass.
In 2024, there were 2.35 crore domestic tourist visits and 65,452 foreign visits, plus 94.55 lakh pilgrim visits to Vaishno Devi alone. The draft creates the Katra-Vaishno Devi axis as a cluster to manage the resultant waste.
For e-waste management, the draft policy relies more on market-based mechanisms than on promises of new infrastructure. It explicitly identifies Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and producer-responsibility contracts as key tools for financing and channelising e-waste collection and recycling. The policy also incorporates recommendations from the Forest and Environment Department to make it mandatory for manufacturers, producers, recyclers and refurbishers to register on the Central Pollution Control Board’s EPR portal. The measure is aimed at strengthening compliance and improving accountability across the e-waste management chain.
The policy folds the construction waste into the Jammu cluster’s mandate and adds a specific scheme route: Public Works/R&B convergence and procurement, alongside PMGSY and MoRTH-aligned road works that mandate a 6 per cent waste-plastic mix in road construction.
The Funding
Perhaps the most consequential change in the new draft is financial. The earlier version offered a single recurring-cost picture on annual basis. The new draft replaces that single number with three ten-year scenarios, each with its own infrastructure, livelihood, and enterprise outcomes attached.
The Conservative scenario totals Rs 2,478.2 crore over ten years, front-loaded into urban infrastructure that tapers sharply as the decade progresses – from Rs 480 crore in Year 1 to roughly Rs 20 crore in Year 10. The Initial Operations and Maintenance support rises from near zero to Rs 54 crore by the final year. This scenario is projected to create 15,728 jobs and 358 enterprises.
The Baseline scenario, totalling Rs 3,548.7 crore, follows a similar tapering pattern but with proportionally larger cluster-system investment (Rs400 crore total) and O&M support that climbs to Rs 122 crore by Year 10. This is projected to generate 25,546 jobs and 624 enterprises.
The Ambitious scenario reaches Rs 4,877.7 crore over ten years, with the largest single line item being cluster systems at Rs 658.7 crore, by far the dominant driver , and O&M support scaling up to Rs 230 crore in Year 10. This scenario projects 38,509 jobs and 1,010 enterprises, and the document’s own framing is notable: moving from Conservative to Ambitious adds roughly 22,750 jobs and 652 enterprises for a 75 per cent increase in spending, which the policy explicitly characterises as “high” marginal return.
Across all three scenarios, the financing logic stays the same: Central Schemes and Missions are expected to supply more than half the total funding.
Market Support
Two other provisions in the draft policy stand out because they received little attention in the earlier version. One relates to market development for circular economy products. The policy identifies the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) portal as the primary and most reliable source of demand for products such as compost and recycled materials.
The policy proposes a J&K Circular Economy Digital Ledger to monitor material flows across Urban Local Bodies and waste management clusters, alongside a dedicated ULB dashboard and compliance module.
The draft also lays out, for the first time, a four-phase implementation timeline. A Preparatory phase of zero to 12 months covers institutional activation; a Roll-Out phase up to three years covers pilot clusters; a Scale-Up phase up to five years and a decade long Consolidation phase.
The first version was an attempt to offer magnitude of the crisis. The second version attempts to fix it. What the new draft cannot do, by its own admission, is guarantee that any of this gets built. It remains, as of this writing, in inter-departmental consultation travelling between officers, tables and computers. Until that distance closes, the waste will keep piling up. And the wealth within it will keep being lost.
