Solid waste management scheme underway for BMC, New Town and NDITA

A comprehensive solid waste management scheme for Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation, New Town and Nabadiganta Industrial Township Authority (NDITA) is underway.

A meeting was held at Poura Bhavan in Salt Lake on Friday between a team from Tamil Nadu and Sabyasachi Dutta, Mayor BMC and Debashis Sen, chairman Housing and Infrastructure Development Corporation HIDCO and NDITA. The team presented a patented technology which is in use in some Urban Local Bodies (ULB) in Tamil Nadu and claimed to give an end to end solution.

The three ULBs off-load garbage at a site popularly known as Mollar Bheri. There is no segregation of waste and the site is slowly getting saturated. Though people started staying in Bidhannagar from mid 1970s, there is no proper trenching ground. 

When the plan of New Town was chalked out in the 1990s, drinking water and solid waste management, two important issues in any township were kept out of the plan. Later, it was decided that a trenching ground would be set up in an area that came under Bhangar Rajarhat Area Development Authority (BRADA) off New Town. At Mollar Bheri, garbage is dumped in an unplanned way.

The team was taken to the dumping site and was asked to give its observation which will be put up for technical scrutiny.

Chairman Sen will open talks with JICA for its assistance for solid waste management for end to end solution, not only at landfill site, but also for efficient and intelligent transportation and collecting process.

It may be mentioned that the century old trenching ground at Bhapa where Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) offloads garbage, has reached a saturation level and compactors have been introduced replacing the old open vats which burn the waste and the ashes are taken to Dhapa. 

The Centre had set up a committee for national solid waste management with the then Municipal Commissioner Asim Burman as its chairman in 1997, but the project did not kick off and management of solid waste has posed a formidable looking problem in all civic bodies throughout the country.