←Bridge the Gap — Healthy Cities
Swapnil Chaurasiya
Behavioural Nudges for Urban Climate Action: A Student-Led Solid Waste Management Model for Bilaspur City
Bilaspur · Chhattisgarh · January to March 2026
Almost every child in Bilaspur already thought segregation was a good idea. Doing it at home went from 24 per cent to 80. The nudge was the child, working on the parent.
24% → 80%
Households segregating waste at home
before and after, January to March 2026
9% → 76%
Children reminding their families to segregate
before and after, January to March 2026
74%
Households that took up a two-bin system
after the intervention, March 2026
~90%
Parents reporting better waste practice at home
after the intervention, March 2026
The work
Move the practice, not the opinion
Ninety-seven to ninety-eight per cent of the children were already in favour of segregation at baseline. Approval was never the gap. The daily habit was.
Send the child home with the job
Checklists, bin labels, take-home tasks, and segregation built into Snakes and Ladders. The family gets reminded by the one person it cannot brush off.
Measure it properly or not at all
The same households surveyed before and after, on a questionnaire built around the theory of planned behaviour, so the result is a number rather than a feeling.
Keep it cheap enough to copy
Posters, labels, board games and one facilitator. A model a second ward can run without a budget line for it.
- Ran three to four school sessions with thirty-six children in Bilaspur
- Built a nudge toolkit of checklists, posters, bin labels and gamified learning
- Surveyed the same households before and after with structured questionnaires
- Reached thirty-five to forty households through the children and their parents
- Analysed the before and after results statistically rather than by show of hands
- Recorded two fathers’ accounts of what changed in their own houses in Bilaspur
The rest of the cohort
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