The Times of India 01.02.2010
Waterbodies are currently the dumpyards in suburbs
CHENNAI: Recently, a team of senior Kancheepuram district officials inspected waterbodies along the 200-ft Pallavaram-Thoraipakkam Radial Road and were shocked to see that almost one-fourth of the ‘Periya Eri’ (big lake) in Ganapathipuram of Pallavaram municipality was levelled with garbage.
With smoke from the continuously-burning mounds of garbage on the bank of the lake blanketing the air, the damage to the environment is considerable. The practice in Ganapathipuram, the lone site available for the municipality to dump the nearly 80 tonnes of garbage generated every day, has been in existence since Independence. Result: the death of a lake.
The Pallavaram municipality is not the only one in the suburbs dumping garbage in waterbodies. Almost all the local bodies, both rural and urban, are guilty of this practice.
Many local bodies are soon to be merged in the expanded Chennai Corporation and the need for sound solid waste management practices is imperative. The local bodies’ inability to segregate waste at source, a shortage of landfill sites and poor support from the government — all contribute to the practice of garbage dumped near waterbodies. “The growing population in the suburbs has led to an acute shortage of land and waterbodies form a convienent place to dispose waste,” a few Pallavaram municipality officials said.
There are over 1,000 waterbodies in Kancheepuram district, including over 300 in Tambaram, Sholinganallur and Alandur taluks. Thirty of these are major lakes covering a total of around 3,000 acres. The six municipalities, 13 town panchayats and 25 village panchayats in Chennai’s southern suburbs have a population of over 30 lakh. The floating population also contributes a fair amount of waste. Every day, on an average, a municipality generates around 70 tonnes of waste, a town panchayat 10 tonnes and a village panchayat one tonne.
While a few local bodies such as the Mudichur village panchayat and the Sholinganallur and Kundrathur town panchayats have modern compost yards where kitchen waste is converted into manure and sold to residents, most others use waterbodies. “A sound solid waste management project involves segegrating waste into bio and non-biodegradable categories at source and disposing it in an environment-friendly way. Dedicated manpower can help achieve it,” says Shiva T Krishnamoorthy, project leader of Hand-in-Hand, an NGO that specialises in solid waste management. At present, garbage collection and disposal in the municipalities is being taken care of by the Sanitary Departments concerned, who are ill-equipped to tackle the huge amounts of garbage generated. In the town panchayats, staff on general duty look after the task while members of the Total Sanitation Campaign in the St. Thomas Mount Panchayat Union monitor handling of garbage in the village panchayats.
The lack of suitable landfill sites combined with an acute fund crunch, has made it difficult for several village panchayats to go in for composting kitchen waste. To ease the strain on the dumping yards in many areas, the concept of integrated compost yards was mooted a few years ago but little progress seems to have been made in this direction.
“Implementing solid waste management projects in local bodies will be challenge for the expanded Chennai Corporation sincle it will have to handle more garbage in a limited space,” says R Selvam of Okkiyan-Thoraipakkam.
