Gargling water from a bottle and spitting it against a wall outside the busy Victoria Terminus railway station in Bombay, Raju Chawan was surprised to learn that he had committed a crime punishable by a fine of 200 rupees (£2.50) Wiping water from his chin, he scuttled away sheepishly with just a reprimand from one of the new litter police who began patrolling the city’s congested and filthy streets yesterday.

In a £130 million drive to clean up India’s most populated city, more than a thousand uniformed marshals, working for five private security companies, will issue on-the-spot fines for a range of offences from spitting and urinating in public to feeding birds, washing cars – and worse.

The steep penalties, as much as 20,000 rupees for failing to properly dispose of biomedical waste, are intended to deter litterbugs in one of the world’s most overcrowded cities. Bombay, which has a population of more than 16 million at the last official count in 2001, produces about 6,500 tonnes of rubbish plus nearly 2,500 tonnes of construction waste every day. A good deal of it is simply tossed on to the streets.

The challenges of rubbish collection in a peninsula city with 29,000 people per square kilometre are exacerbated by the constant influx of migrants seeking their fortune. Most of the half a million people that enter Bombay every year from across India find shelter in squalid slums.

“Every day we get 300 families coming in and they do not bring a good civic sense,” R. A. Rajeev, the additional municipal commissioner for Bombay, said. “They are from underdeveloped rural areas. Education will need to be continuous.”

The city’s 983 rubbish trucks, which make 1,396 round trips each day, and its tens of thousands of sweepers cannot keep pace with the mounting waste. So, for the first time, the mayor has empowered ranks of litter police, who will keep half the revenue generated by fines.

Fanning out from the council’s offices on foot, motorbikes and in cars after their official inauguration, the marshals – who were equipped with digital cameras to collect evidence – did not take long to find their first offenders.

In the first month, marshals have been instructed to issue warnings to allow word to spread of the new regime before imposing fines. Offenders who are unable to pay will have to perform a community service, such as sweeping or cleaning walls of graffiti, for “at least one hour”. Vilas Sawant, a local resident caught spitting a few minutes later, said: “I did not know. I am ashamed and I will definitely not do it again now I do.”

Bombay is forecast to replace Tokyo as the world’s most populous city by 2020. Officials say that there is no widespread sense of civic pride in India’s bigger cities, which are populated by many immigrants and where diseases are carried by dirty water, people spitting and defecating in public and animals rooting through piles of refuse. In a country where only the privileged have a private toilet, or even access to a public one, it is common to see rows of people defecating in public. For Bombay commuters, a regular early morning vision is of Bombay slum-dwellers squatting along the urban railway tracks.

“The challenge is that there are just too many people. Changing attitudes in India is a billion times harder than in smaller countries,” Shibani Sachdeva, a director of a citizens’ group that has been running its own clean-up campaign since floods devastated Bombay in 2005, said. The group is auditing the council’s latest project to ensure that the contracted marshals do not abuse their positions by pocketing the fines.

Other Indian cities are set to follow Bombay’s lead. Authorities in Bangalore, the country’s IT hub, which produces about 2,200 tonnes of waste daily, are considering using the territorial army to help to police its streets for litterbugs. It has also imposed a system of on-the-spot fines.

Whereas Bangalore is using the territorial army to push its clean-up message, Bombay will use Bollywood stars in its efforts to instill a new civic attitude.

On-the-spot penalties

200* Spitting

200 Urinating

100 Defecating

500 Pets defecating

500 Feeding animals

200 Washing utensils/clothes

1,000 Car washing

100 Nonsegregation of garden waste

20,000 Nonsegregation of biomedical waste

*rupees

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