Kelwada is a popular tourist site close to the famous Kumbhalgarh fort. It is 75 km from Udaipur and is home to a population of over 800 households with many hotels and restaurants. More than 1000 tourists visit Kelwada daily and pass through the main market area to reach the fort. As a result, a lot of hotels and resorts have also come up on the route to the fort and cater to their staying arrangements and large quantities of waste are generated by the hotels, shops, and the public transport vehicles that stop in the town daily.

InterGlobe Foundation provided support to Seva Mandir for the creation of solid waste management systems (especially in setting up waste collection and proper disposal mechanisms for the main market area) in Kelwada town to enhance living conditions. This pilot has now become a successful intervention and has become a good model to learn from and is being replicated throughout Rajasthan.

Learnings and challenges from the project have also been greatly highlighted in various district-level and state-level platforms. Kelwara has also recently been declared as ODF plus Gram Panchayat and the Resource Recovery Centre (solid waste management site) had been declared as Rajasthan's first waste management centre.

This model now needs to be strengthened so that it can continue its services for the local community in the future as well. For proper running of the model, the system needed to be backed up with the required resources. We were tying up with external agencies for picking up and paying for the collected plastic waste at the site. But due to uncompressed plastic, lesser waste could be loaded in trucks leading to less storage space and high transport costs. Hence a compressor machine was purchased from funds provided by the InterGlobe Foundation. This will deeply help in increasing the efficiency of the waste management model in Kelwara and enhancing its scope further. The compressor machine was inaugurated by Ms. Nimisha Gupta (CEO Zila Parishad Rajsamand)

Kelwara Vikas Samiti is a community-based apex body created by Seva Mandir and is responsible for overall monitoring of the waste management work. The overall ownership of the machinery will remain with the Kelwara Vikas Samiti.