More than a year after it partially demolished and closed the waste transit station on Sathyamangalam Road, Ganapathy, the Coimbatore Corporation is drawing rebuilding plans.
The Corporation had to do so to facilitate the construction of the Gandhipuram flyover. The cessation of operations there was in February 2015 when the transit station was handling around 150 tonnes waste a day.
Sources said that now the civic body was planning to reconstruct the transit station to resume waste management operations. The Ganapathy station served as the nodal point for waste the Coimbatore Corporation collected in a few wards in the North Zone and also Central Zone.
The workers at the transit station would compact those into compactors and then the contractor in-charge of the waste management in Vellalore would take it to the Vellalore yard.
But since the cessation of operations there, the Corporation was forced to divert some of the waste to Peelamedu and took the rest directly to Vellalore.
The sources said that this resulted in additional trips for the waste carrying lorries and increased fuel expenditure for the Corporation. The number of trips touched nearly 500.
If the transit station were to resume operation, the Corporation would save on lorry trips as the contractor would transport the waste from there to Vellalore. To resume the operation, the Corporation was working out a plant, where the plant could handle 250 tonnes in two shifts.
The contractor would soon engage planners and engineers who would study the available space to build a transit station there.
The sources said that the Corporation was also looking at building a new transit station in Ondipudur to handle waste from wards in East Zone. As per the agreement with the contractor, the Corporation was supposed to have built four transit stations but it built only three – Sathyamangalam Road (Ganapathy), Peelamedu and Ukkadam.
The Ondipudur project never took off reportedly due to protest from the residents there.
These were projects started with Central Government funds under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Remewal Mission.
Now with a sewage treatment plant functioning there, the Corporation proposed to built a new transit station there. In all possibility, the Corporation could execute the two projects together, the sources added.
