JOIN USThe rustic wisdom of yore, tempered by modern technologies and environment management processes, is pouring into Tamil Nadu’s burgeoning cities before their mounting garbage could devour them.
Recent trends in managing urban waste by two historic municipal corporations in Tamil Nadu have thrown up key insights laced with a good measure of success, even while underscoring the challenges on the road ahead.
The Madras (now Chennai) Corporation, the oldest municipal institution in India established in September 1688, is today in an unenviable situation. The engine leading the State’s rapid urbanisation - the rate is close to 49 per cent by 2011 census - now covers an expanded area of 426 sq km, with its wards going up from 155 to 200. The municipal body is now on an average removing 5,000 tonnes to 5,200 tonnes of solid waste a day.
There are no simple, straight lines in this topography. But the emergence of NGOs’, notably Exnora International, played a key part in hand-holding with people’s representatives in cleaning up and greening Chennai.
A research study by Bharat Dahiya, a Cambridge scholar who specialises in urban governance and environment issues and is associated with World Bank, has shown how a women-initiated NGO, ‘Shri Shankar Nagar Mahalir Mandram’ in suburban Pammal years back, was a stepping stone in implementing a new model of waste collection, disposal and cleanliness. The model is quite simple: buy tricycles and bins with a grant, appoint ‘street beautifiers’ and initiate house-to-house collection. Residents were advised even at the first point of collection to separate the organic waste from the ‘recyclable materials. Exnora tried this out in Vellore.
And by teaching a simple ‘vermi-compost’ technique, 80 per cent of the total solid waste generated (organic) in Shankar Nagar was being ‘composted’ into good manure. This drastically reduced the net waste to be dumped at a disposal site and also had a “significant impact”on solid waste management processes in Chennai also. Later, the Chennai Corporation brought in a French MNC through a joint venture, ‘CES-Oynx’, partly mechanising garbage clearance in the city.
Two big garbage dumping yards for the entire Metro was created in Perungudi and Kodingaiur, in the south and north respectively. But these two yards are now becoming environmentally hazardous as no segregation of waste is being done. Hence, Chennai Corporation now under the AIADMK Mayor Saidai Doraisamy, has, through the part-privatisation route, decided to ‘scientifically close’ the two garbage dump yards with remediation techniques, develop three new eco-friendly waste collection yards in adjacent Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur districts and install modern ’solid waste process systems’ there.
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