The Hindu      26.08.2016  

Corpn. plans to rebuild transit station

The Sathyamangalam Road transit station that the Coimbatore Corporation is planning to rebuild.—Photo: S. Siva Saravanan

More than a year after it partially demolished and
closed the waste transit station on Sathyamangalam Road, Ganapathy, the
Coimbatore Corporation is drawing rebuilding plans.

The
Corporation had to do so to facilitate the construction of the
Gandhipuram flyover. The cessation of operations there was in February
2015 when the transit station was handling around 150 tonnes waste a
day.

Sources said that now the civic body was
planning to reconstruct the transit station to resume waste management
operations. The Ganapathy station served as the nodal point for waste
the Coimbatore Corporation collected in a few wards in the North Zone
and also Central Zone.

The workers at the transit
station would compact those into compactors and then the contractor
in-charge of the waste management in Vellalore would take it to the
Vellalore yard.

But since the cessation of operations
there, the Corporation was forced to divert some of the waste to
Peelamedu and took the rest directly to Vellalore.

The
sources said that this resulted in additional trips for the waste
carrying lorries and increased fuel expenditure for the Corporation. The
number of trips touched nearly 500.

If
the transit station were to resume operation, the Corporation would
save on lorry trips as the contractor would transport the waste from
there to Vellalore. To resume the operation, the Corporation was working
out a plant, where the plant could handle 250 tonnes in two shifts.

The contractor would soon engage planners and engineers who would study the available space to build a transit station there.

The
sources said that the Corporation was also looking at building a new
transit station in Ondipudur to handle waste from wards in East Zone. As
per the agreement with the contractor, the Corporation was supposed to
have built four transit stations but it built only three –
Sathyamangalam Road (Ganapathy), Peelamedu and Ukkadam.

The Ondipudur project never took off reportedly due to protest from the residents there.

These were projects started with Central Government funds under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Remewal Mission.

Now
with a sewage treatment plant functioning there, the Corporation
proposed to built a new transit station there. In all possibility, the
Corporation could execute the two projects together, the sources added.