Pune: The twin villages of Uruli Devachi and Phursungi, located around 20 km from Pune and used as landfill sites for the city’s garbage, are in the grips of yet another impasse.
For the last three weeks, civic authorities and ruling party leaders have failed to soothe the irate Uruli-Phursungi residents protesting against the indiscriminate dumping of garbage in the villages. The villagers continued to protest on Tuesday.
The latest crisis arose after a fire broke out at the garbage depot at Uruli Devachi last month. The blaze was bought under control, but fumes continue to emanate from the depot.
Furthermore, key decision-makers like Guardian Minister Girish Bapat and newly-elected Pune Mayor Mukta Tilak are out of the country: the former in Australia, and the latter in Mexico for a conference on women’s empowerment. Both are not expected to return to the city for more than a week.
With no dumping of dry or wet garbage at the landfill, waste has been piling up within the city, which generates an average 1,700 tonne of garbage each day.
“We are trying hard to clean the city by making more biogas plants operational. However, there is a massive backlog of 500 tonne of untreated waste,” said Rajendra Jagtap, chief of the Pune Municipal Corporation’s (PMC) solid waste department.
On Tuesday, despite Municipal Commissioner Kunal Kumar who himself recently returned from a foreign tour, hurriedly left to inspect the depots in the twin villages. But residents remained firm on their long-pending demand for an alternative disposal site. As the relentless dumping has polluted the groundwater, the villagers have also sought construction of two water tanks after a pipeline scheme came a cropper.
For years, these villages have faced the brunt of Pune’s indiscriminate expansion with the problem of solid waste disposal reaching monstrous proportions. In 1981, the Maharashtra government allotted 43 acres in Uruli for a landfill site, and provisioned another 120 acres in Phursungi in 2003 to meet the growing city’s waste-disposal demands.
In 2016, the crisis brought into sharp relief the urban-rural divide in Pune district. While methane emissions from the landfills permeate the air, the villagers have been subjected to a litany of maladies owing to pollution of their water sources.
Activists from the villages have noted at least 1,900 instances of fire breaking out in the garbage dumps in the last decade. The villagers have deployed every form of protest against the PMC, from sendng show cause notices to halting garbage trucks from entering.
To compound the problem, the PMC in recent years has shut down the waste processing plants set up by Hanjer Biotech in the villages. Even when they were operational, despite a waste-treating capacity of 1,000 tonnes, the decrepit units were barely processing 200 tonnes of waste.
Last year, NGOs had written to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, demanding a probr by the Anti-Corruption Bureau into irregularities plaguing the garbage processing units. The Nagrik Chetana Manch and the Sajag Nagrik Manch had said taxpayers’ money was not being utilised properly.
