Managing Waste

Managing Waste

Deepor Beel, the lone Ramsar site wetland in the State, needs to breathe free. Land sharks working for powerful people have been whittling away at its margins, letting loose illegal constructions. But a far larger threat is rapidly burgeoning Guwahati city, choking under its own waste. A considerable part of the solid waste has been finding its way to the once pristine wetland, presently much sullied and shrunken. The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has now asked the Assam government to give top priority to a solid waste management plant for the city. Dispur’s submission is that a committee has been set up to identify ‘within two months’ a suitable site for shifting the municipal solid waste plant away from Deepor Beel. For over two years, the tribunal took hearings on a case filed by RTI activist Rohit Choudhury related to damage to Deepor Beel’s ecosystem, including alleged unregulated and illegal dumping of garbage and sewage in and around the wetland. The NGT sought status reports from the State government about waste dumping and construction activities at the wetland, and whether the rules were being followed by Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) and Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC). Early last year, the State government in an affidavit to the NGT had argued that the garbage dumping site at Boragaon near Deepor Beel did not violate any law. It had then sought some time to draw up a long-term management plan to protect the wetland, with IIT Kharagpur commissioned to prepare the plan. Judging by the repeated extensions sought to get a grip on Guwahati’s solid waste problem, it is not turning into a smart city anytime in near future. The ‘Gateway to the Northeast’ has been going down in Swachh Survekshan surveys for last three years; Guwahati ranked 50th on cleanliness in 2016, 134th in 2017 and 207th in 2018.

Of the solid waste generated daily in Guwahati as per a report by NGO Environ, as much as 37,000 kgs is plastic waste; the city takes up only 0.42 percent of Assam’s land area but contributes disproportionately high 12.4 percent of the total plastic waste generated daily in the State. While 40 percent of the plastic is non-recyclable and mixes with biodegradable waste to pose a huge menace, the remaining 60 percent recyclable plastic too is collected irregularly. Despite nearly 60 NGOs working in the city, it is the rag-pickers who are the foot soldiers in the battle to keep Guwahati clean. The thrust is still on primary and secondary collection of solid waste to be dumped mostly at Boragaon. Now where will the city planners find another large site on the city outskirts to dump garbage without spoiling the environment and making the locals suffer? They are yet to scale up to a viable system for segregating solid waste at source and processing it. Like Guwahati, waste in other cities of the State is being dumped onto water bodies and rivers. According to Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) data for 2018, detailing 351 polluted stretches on 323 rivers across the country, Assam comes second after Maharashtra in terms of polluted river stretches. With the Supreme Court sternly holding the States to account over absence of solid waste management policies, the Assam government has finalised a draft plan this year. While urban local bodies, NGOs and start-ups working in the cleanliness sector need to get their acts together and work in synergy, the draft policy highlights the efficacies of a decentralized system. Instead of a centralised dumping site, there could be a network of waste management centres for collection, segregation and processing of garbage. This would help cut transportation and fuel costs to carry garbage to far off dumping sites, reduce traffic congestion and air pollution. Small entrepreneurs can be given opportunities in making composts, generating biogas or recycling into products like plastic bricks. There is a lot that can and needs be done on the cleanliness front, the trick is to get going.

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