The Hindu            29.10.2013

Solid waste management scheme should be probed

Mayor S.M. Velusamy has asked the Coimbatore Corporation
Commissioner G. Latha to investigate the way the civic body has
implemented the Rs. 98-crore solid waste management (SWM) scheme.

After ordering the investigation at the last Ordinary Council Meeting on Friday, he told
The Hindu
on Monday that the way the civic body — meaning officials — had implemented the scheme was not right.

For, the civic body continued to face problems.

It was not the first time that he had asked for the investigation.

“I’ve
been asking the officials to carry out a probe ever since I assumed
office sometime in October 2011. I had asked the then Commissioner T.K.
Ponnusamy, the Deputy Commissioner S. Sivarasu, who for sometime held
charge as Commissioner and also the present Commissioner Ms. Latha.”

Stating
that the officials had not taken seriously his suggestions for a probe,
Mr. Velusamy said that he was forced to reiterate the demand in the
council.

Sources familiar with the implementation of
the solid waste management programme said that right from the word go,
the Union Government-funded scheme did not proceed in the right
direction.

The corporation had not distributed bins
to all the city’s residents in that it was supposed to have to given
white and green bins to each of the city’s residents so as to help them
segregate waste into wet and dry wastes.

The
corporation had not purchased the right number of pushcarts, was short
of roadside bins, was yet to phase out bullock carts in waste management
and had not successfully implemented the ban on plastics that were less
than 40 microns.

The sources said that the
corporation had concentrated the second and third stage of the project
in that had bought a few bins, constructed a few transit stations,
bought vehicles for the transport of the waste from the transit stations
to the dump yard in Vellalore and roped in a contractor to process the
waste there.

What the corporation did not do was
educate the city’s residents on waste segregation — the first of the
three stages of the waste management.

The result of
the poor awareness creation exercise was that the Corporation
transported mixed waste to the dump yard, where processing became next
to impossible.

The sources said that the corporation
was yet to spend the Rs. 45 lakh the Union Government gave to create
awareness under the waste management project.