Solid Waste Management of Dimapur Town: Are the Locals Willing to Pay for Improvement?

The urban governance has to face a challenging situation to serve the cities with increasing generation of solid waste. This paper intends to showcase the scenario of solid waste management of the Dimapur town of Nagaland, India and examine the local people’s willingness to cooperate with the municipalities to minimize the problem. Contingent valuation (CV) method with open-ended format have been used to know the willingness to pay (WTP) of the people for proper management of the waste. A sample of 100 have been selected to interact with from the closest distance of the dumping site. Where the residents face various health issues and other problems like bad odure that prevent them from conducting any social functions at their residents. The objective of the study is to understand the various problems faced by the residents of the area and to estimate the wiliness of the people to join hands with the municipal council to address the problems.

A 2SLS regression model is applied to analysis the data, by selecting two instrumental variables. The model reveals that the age of the respondent is significant at a level of .009, with a unstandardized B value of -022, which implies that with every increase in age there is a probability that the willingness to pay decreases by 2.2 percent. The distance from the dumping area is significant at .000, which shows that it is highly significant factor. This study might be helpful to policy makers in formulating policy, of paid service relating to solid waste management in Dimapur.