The Indian Express                   01.04.2013

Pause to Kanpur’s door-to-door garbage collection scheme

The door-to-door collection of solid waste in Kanpur for which the city received award for Improvement in Solid Waste Management (SWM) in Urban Infrastructure and Governance from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for the year 2010 has now stopped operating. Problems created by the Kanpur Municipal Corporation are to be blamed behind the decision of the firm — M/s A2Z Infrastructure Ltd, which has the contract to collect waste and process it — to stop the operation.

According to the firm, the municipal corporation has failed pay the tipping fees totalling Rs 8 crore that has resulted into a financial crisis for the firm. "Our expenditure is around Rs 1.5 crore per month for paying salaries of staff and running the vehicles and processing plant. But due to delay in payment of the tipping fees from the municipal corporation, we had to reduce staff at the processing plant also," said Sudhikant Tripathi, A2Z's industrial relations officer.

The SWM project in Kanpur was initiated under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission scheme at the cost of Rs 56.23 crore on public-private partnership model. M/s A2Z Infrastructure Ltd bagged the contract and commissioned the processing plant in 2010. It started door-to-door collection of garbage, its transportation to a sanitary landfill site spread over 46 hectares, and its processing for producing bio-fertilizer bags, bricks and tiles from inorganic waste and refused derived fuel. The firm also set up a power plant of 15 MW generation capacity that is scheduled to be fully operational next month.

According to sources, the delay in payment to A2Z started after the change of government in UP and the new Samajwadi Party decided to re-examine the project. "The payment to the firm was regular in the previous BSP regime," said an official.

As per the contract, A2Z collects user charges door-to-door and hands over the collected amount to the municipal corporation and get back tipping fees at the rate of Rs 470 per tonne. "But as we are not collecting municipal waste from users, we would not be able to collect also the user charges in April," Tripathi said. He said the state government had notified user charges at the rate of Rs 30 per month for BPL families to Rs 1,000 per month for commercial buildings.

Tripathi said the company was now collecting waste from collection centres set up by municipal corporation and transporting that to processing plant. The situation has created problems before the residents who have to walk to the primary collection centres of municipal corporation to dump the garbage. Tripathi said the door-to-door collection has been stopped also in Varanasi because of delayed payments.

Meanwhile, Principal Secretary of Urban Development C B Paliwal said that he has sought a report on the issue from Kanpur Municipal Corporation. "I have received a letter from A2Z stating that it has some finance-related problems, and it has stopped door-to-door collection of garbage in Kanpur. I have sought a report from Kanpur Municipal Commissioner in this regard and matter would be solved very soon," Paliwal said.

The Hindu                       01.04.2013

Civic body manages to bring down some stink

Sustainable solution:A biogas plant installed at the Sreekanteswaram park in Thiruvananthapuram. —Photo: S. Gopakumar.

The Corporation is pushing hard the concept of managing waste at source by the citizens as no alternative has yet been found to the Vilappilsala plant and installation of new garbage treatment plants.

The civic body had found part success in implementing the idea with apartments, hotels, and households installing compost units and biogas plants on their premises to treat solid waste.

Data available with Corporation officials revealed that 120 apartments had installed compost units with a capacity to process 50 kg to 100 kg of solid waste per day. The units installed by government-approved service providers were eligible for a subsidy of Rs.500 per unit, said an official.

As many as 226 houses had set up small biogas plants and the gas generated was being used to meet a part of their cooking needs. The plants had the capacity to process 2.5kg to 7.5 kg of waste per day and the Corporation offered a 75 per cent subsidy, the official said.

After the subsidy, a household would need to spend Rs.2,000 to set up the plant, the official said.

“The cost involved is a hindrance in pushing the idea. But the feedback we get is that those who installed the biogas plants manage to marginally reduce the dependence on LPG,” he added. Among the hoteliers, the concept of setting up biogas plants was slowly catching up with around 60 hotels in the city already installing the facility, the official said.

In the scheme of things that formed part of the civic body’s decentralised garbage management plan, the pipe compost was the most ambitious.

After rolling out the scheme, 50,000 pipe compost units had been installed in houses, but, of late, the scheme was getting less patronage. At present, the requests for application have come down from 1,000 to 200 a week, the official said.

The programme lost its sheen after residents complained of slow decay of garbage and sighting of worms inside pipe composts. In certain areas, the Corporation tried inoculation but it did not find much success as it needed a minimum moisture for the garbage to decay. The programme was but running well in Chettivilakkara ward, which was one of the first areas in the city to experiment with pipe compost.

Around 3,000 residents in Chettivilakkara hade installed pipe compost units and in a few months all houses in the ward would be provided the facility.

The residents there dumped small quantities of mud inside the pipe and that facilitated easy decay, the official said.

Mayor K. Chandrika told The Hindu that 10 biogas plants had been installed in government schools, markets, and public places. The civic body was in the process of setting up 20 more such units.

The Corporation had incurred an expenditure of around Rs.4.30 crore as subsidy component towards installing waste treatment units, she added.