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.