Around six months ago, in the run up to the World Environment Day, the Coimbatore Corporation said it was extending segregated waste collection at doorsteps from 50 to 100 wards, which means the entire city.
It also announced setting up of separate bins for storing wet and dry wastes. In short, an efficient waste collection system. The announcement followed an order of the Southern Bench of the National Green Tribunal that asked the civic body to pull up its socks.
As of November, the civic body appears to have done little. Or it is not visible on the ground, say residents.
Sources within the civic body said all that was needed were more pushcarts to ensure segregated waste collection at doorstep and more workers to go with the carts.
In the absence of the two in the last six months, the workers continued to collect waste in segregated fashion, dump them in roadside bins and from there the mixed waste reaches the Vellalore dump yard.
The civic body staff and also the waste treatment plant operators confirmed that the waste reached the Vellalore yard in a mixed fashion. Their estimate was that hardly 10 % of the 400-odd tonnes the plant processed daily was segregated. The other 500-odd tonnes that the corporation handled was mixed, they admitted.
Corporation officials said the State Government recently granted ₹10.50 crore with which the civic body would buy over 500 pushcarts, 52 battery-operated vehicles, over 1,000 bins for storing organic (wet) waste, five small vehicles for transporting dry waste and construct dry waste collection hubs.
It would float tenders and get things in place by January 2018.
As for deploying additional workers, the corporation had assessed its requirement at 1,470. It would engage them by working with manpower agencies.
