With even a Supreme Court directive failing to salvage it from the seething waste management crisis, the City Corporation is keeping its fingers crossed and hoping that the State government will bail it out of the debacle at least before the onset of monsoon.
As the reopening of the Vilappilsala solid-waste treatment plant continues to remain a distant dream, management of accumulated waste, especially in public places, has become a major concern for the local body.
“The ball is not in the Corporation's court. It is for the State government to come up with some solution. As far as the Corporation is concerned, Vilappilsala is our only solution and we have also received a Supreme Court verdict in our favour. It is now for the government to support us and facilitate immediate reopening of the plant,” Mayor K. Chandrika says.
Corporation officials say the crisis is going out of their hands in at least five Corporation wards, including Thampanoor, Sreekanteshwaram, Palkulangara, Fort, and parts of Kamaleswaram, where garbage is fast accumulating in public places and also spilling into the streets.
With no space to landfill or even burn the garbage in these wards, waste collection from public places and waysides has come to a standstill here.
Resistance
“In most other wards, we still have some land left for landfilling the collected garbage. But here, even our workers are helpless. They cannot take waste collected from these wards to other places, fearing opposition from the local residents,” a Corporation official says.
“Although in some places people are resorting to burning of waste, it is not a viable or advisable solution. Also, when there is huge heaps of garbage, you need large spaces even to burn it. Otherwise, it can lead to further problems and causalities,” the official says.
The source-level treatment project using pipe composts in households is the only programme initiated for waste management so far. However, even that is not a solution for management of garbage accumulated in public places.
Although the State government had mooted a project to procure incinerator units for the Corporation to process waste collected from public places, the project is still in the bidding stage. Officials say that even if the bidding is completed and a company from which the unit to be bought is finalised, it will take another month-and-a-half to procure the incinerators after the orders are placed since they have to be custom-made.
