What do you do when a Corporation engineer drops in at 11 a.m. and says, “There is a meeting at 3 p.m. today of all stakeholders in the areas of source segregation and composting.” You drop everything you have planned for the day and head for the obscure little “kalyana mandapam / community hall” somewhere in Madipakkam so that you can contribute something at the meeting.
For the last five years, Sabari Terrace, a small community of 56 apartments on Old Mahabalipuram Road that we are a part of, has been practising source segregation and vermi-composting. The sustained effort has yielded positive results, which include inspiring other communities in the region to do the same. So, it felt like a good idea to go to this meeting. We tried to get many “like-minded” people and friends who have joined hands with us to form the Federation of OMR Residents Associations (FOMRRA), to come with us but given the last-minute notice and their commitments, most of them could not make it.
Even 10 minutes before the event started, the hall was sparsely occupied. Considering that the meeting was going to have resident-representatives of localities in Zones 11, 12, 14 and 15, this was surprising. We were holding a few seats for friends who said they were delayed in traffic.
But, moments before Regional Deputy Commissioner (South) Gopala Sundara Raj and a few other high-ranking Corporation officials made their way to the dais, the hall magically filled to capacity. The assemblage now consisted largely of Corporation staff, including engineers, and conservancy workers.
The meeting started with the customary welcoming, thanking, praising of all the people who had gathered there and then eased into a PowerPoint presentation that seemed to go on ad infinitum The presentation slowly graduated to drawing conclusions from the statistics that were presented earlier. The central message was something like this: “Since the statistics show that we will have such a huge increase in garbage generation in the next 10 years, we want to privatise the process.”
A stormy session
Then it happened.
One by one, the people in the crowd began to interrupt the presentation. Some participants let their emotions get the better of them. With the yelling subsiding, there were a few speeches which dwelt on why the conservancy process should not be privatised. Needless to say, these “speeches” were greeted with thunderous applause. Some of the conservancy workers sitting near us explained they were all here because they feared that private contractors would steal their jobs. They also asked for our support to ensure that they were given ‘permanent jobs’.
In all this pandemonium, a few of us tried to express in vain our ideas about solid waste management. Someone suggested that the public should be able to buy shares of the new “company” that was going to handle the garbage, enabling more accountability and transparency. Others were more concerned about the safety of the conservancy workers and asked that they be provided with gloves and masks.
A few of us felt that this whole public or private or public-private formula was just an administrative issue and there should be more focus on better accountability standards if we wanted to see any change on the ground. Ultimately, we want to ensure that the segregated garbage, that we send out of our homes is not ‘re-mixed’ and dumped in a landfill.
One of the gentlemen on the dais — who seemed to be quite knowledgeable about the whole process — assured us that the new process of collection of segregated garbage does not allow for ‘re-mixing’ as the entire idea of ‘transfer stations’ has been done away with. It was however not clear how the ‘private’ operator was going to be paid — was it based purely on haulage (tonnes of waste transferred and dumped), or was there going to be a feedback mechanism — something like a ‘satisfaction index’ — from the local welfare associations.
There needs to be more debate on this.
The officers assured us that there would be another round of discussions in July where more details would be shared. Hopefully, next time, the meeting is held in a more orderly fashion, at the individual zonal offices with enough notice so that more people can attend it and express their views.
Short videos, posters and memes on “what each of us do” to support this waste management initiative has to be produced to help create greater awareness. Nobody has time for lengthy powerpoint presentations and debates.
WhatsApp groups
A simple WhatsApp group for each zone will ensure proper information about meetings is provided and facilitate sharing of ideas and debates. The police are doing it at each police station and it has helped open up a powerful channel of communication between the public and police officials.
So, we went to this meeting thinking we were going to contribute to making all our zones segregation-compliant, and were excited about composting their wet-wastes. Instead, we came back home wondering if we were all just called to witness a PowerPoint presentation and a turf war between the conservancy unions and the officials.
(Prabha Koda and Harsha Koda are residents of Sabari Terrace and coordinators at FOMRRA)
