A two-day national seminar, ‘Preparing for the urban challenges of the 21st century’, with focus on solid waste management, began here on Monday.

It started with the session ‘Challenges of urbanisation in India’. Urban Affairs Minister Manjalamkuzhi Ali was the chief guest and it was chaired by Chief Secretary E K Bharat Bhushan.

Ali, while addressing the seminar, said that the process for starting municipal solid waste-to-energy plants at three select locations in the state was over.

The seminar is being organised by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) in association with the state government.

The session started with the opening remarks by Isher Judge Ahluwalia, project leader and chairperson of ICRIER, New Delhi. There were presentations on ‘HPEC (Ahluwalia) report in 2011’ by Tanushree Bhan, which highlighted the reality of urbanisation and an ‘Overview on solid waste management in India’ by Suneel Pandey, senior fellow of TERI, New Delhi, that touched upon the advantages and disadvantages of various methods used for solid waste management. 

The second session was on ‘Solid waste management and disposal’ chaired by Principal Secretary, Local Self-Government James Varghese. Presentations were made by E H Pathan on the solid waste management of Surat municipal corporation, G Latha on Coimbatore municipal corporation and Tarika Khanna on Gorai landfill.

The theme of the afternoon session was ‘Biomethanation of segregated waste’ and began with an overview by Sharad P Kale, associate professor of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) Mumbai. There were sessions on the biomethanation practices in Pune, in Andhra Pradesh, waste to energy project at Solapur municipal corporation and decentralised solid waste management practices of CREDAI.

The second day, Tuesday, will begin with a special session on ‘Solid waste management in Indian cities’ chaired by Sudhir Krishna. Chief Minister Oommen Chandy will deliver the special address. Presentations will be on ‘Current initiatives in solid waste management in Indian cities’, ‘Issues in municipal waste-to-energy’ and ‘Issues in solid waste management in Kerala.’

K Kasturirangan, Member of Planning Commission and K M Chandrasekhar, Vice-Chairman of State Planning Board will speak.

Session two on the day will deal with experiments in waste-to-energy, chaired by Kasturirangan. There will be presentations on thermal gasification in Pune, advanced fuel combustion technology in Kanpur and mass burn technology in Jindal, Delhi.

The concluding session will deal with the issues in public-private partnership in solid waste management which will be followed by a discussion.