How to clean up Dehli

I recently returned from India, and it was a fantastic holiday, but the main problem with Dehli is that it is so dirty. Millions of tonnes of rubbish literally litter the streets. At the same time India's unemployment levels are high, with huge numbers of poverty-stricken people crowding the dirtyest parts of the cities.

The solution is one borrowed from the USA, where you can claim a 5 cent reward for returning a glass beer bottle for reuse or recycling. Recycling might be a bit too much of a leap for India at this stage, but the same principle could surely be used to gather all the rubbish into collection depots, from where it could be easily transported to landfill sites.

The reward would presumably be paid per unit weight, since all kinds of rubbish would be involved, not just bottles. But the reward would have to be different for each type of rubbish, since otherwise people will simply fill bags full of broken bricks and get the heaviest weight possible. I think the main categories of street rubbish are paper, plastic, metal, organic and glass. In each case you need a reward that is more than a person could earn begging, but less than the cost of deploying a worker on an hourly wage to collect the rubbish.

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