Moolah from garbage: Tenali Municipality shows the way

The success mantra is segregation of wet and dry waste

October 18, 2011 01:08 pm | Updated 01:08 pm IST - VIJAYAWADA:

Tenali Municipal Environmental Engineer Uday Singh Gautam makes a presentation on initiatives for total disposal of solid waste during an interactive session at The Hindu in Vijayawada. Photo: Ch.Vijaya Bhaskar

Tenali Municipal Environmental Engineer Uday Singh Gautam makes a presentation on initiatives for total disposal of solid waste during an interactive session at The Hindu in Vijayawada. Photo: Ch.Vijaya Bhaskar

Who loves garbage? None! Everyone wants to keep it as far away from their household as possible, but the scientific disposal of garbage has been forgotten by all the stakeholders denying people the benefits of such a practice.

An environmental engineer of theTenali Municipality in Guntur district turned the collection and scientific disposal of garbage into a win-win proposition for the local body, and woman sanitation workers were re-christened Nagara Deepika and men as ‘Street Decorators' with the activity raining money for all of them, while keeping the town bin-free.

At an interactive programme ‘ The Hindu Health and Lifestyle', the environmental engineer Uday Singh Gautam strongly opposed the collection of user fee just for collection of garbage in majority of municipal corporations, while it is not disposed of scientifically, but dumped at another place, spoiling the environment there.

Success mantra of the Tenali model of garbage disposal is segregation of wet and dry garbage at the generation point – be it in the kitchen or in a factory, which provides leverage to the municipality to generate good quality recyclable dry that is sold at Rs.3 a kg through an MoU, while the Vijayawada Municipality spends money to just collect and dump, collecting Rs.10 to Rs.20 from each household where door-to-door collection is available.

There is no littering on streets/drains anymore as a sanitary worker collects from 1,400 households using an autorickshaw or cycle rickshaw at a fixed time everyday by having a log of house-wise garbage collection days and out of 100 MT of garbage so produced, 40 MT is sold for recycling generating a revenue of Rs.15 lakh per annum. “User charges are collected from bulk garbage producers in commercial spaces providing the municipality Rs.12.34 lakh and penalties for use of plastics or improper garbage disposal bring another Rs.2.09 lakh,” Mr. Udai Singh said. Dedicated to his work, he has been planning innovatively to make the city bin-free and that showed in the form of the only municipality in the country to get UNEP Membership as part of its Clean-up the World campaign. The appreciation did not stop here, with Tenali winning Green Leaf Award, Paryavaran Mitra Award and two others.

New plans

The engineer plans installation of fuel-free incinerators at all the street-end points where all inert material could be burnt with minimal investment. Segregation at each household producing just 1 k.g. garbage per day was very easy compared to impossible task of segregating one tonnes of mixed garbage.

Guntur, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam and Rajahmundry Corporations also could follow this methodology of disposal, he opined, but sees lack of initiative from the people's representatives and the officials to implement it at the micro level.

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