Dairy owners from the Tajpur road dairy complex dumped cow dung in front of the municipal corporation’s office in Sarabha Nagar to protest the closure of a pipe connecting the ‘Seechewal Model’ directly to the Buddha Nullah that is meant to manage overflow at the facility. They demanded immediate solution to their problem following which the civic body said that the issue was being looked into.
Lovely Singh, president of the Dairy Owners’ Association, said the dairy complex had three blocks having a waste output of around 4 MLD, but the effluent treatment plant (ETP) at the complex has the capacity of 2.25 MLD. “To meet the additional waste load, Rajya Sabha member Balbir Singh Seechewal, who is leading a project to clean Buddha Nullah, came up with a system called ‘Seechewal Model’ having four wells that the waste water passes through so the solid waste can settle down and the remaining liquid waste can be channeled into the ETP which can’t deal with solid waste. This system was closed on Thursday evening, leading to waste water overflowing and covering the streets in block C of the dairy complex.”
An MC official, requesting anonymity, said the issue arose due to the output of more liquid waste than can be treated. “The cow dung in the liquid waste settles down in these four wells and is then removed. However, dairy owners use more waste than can be processed. This overwhelms the system. The drain that takes liquid waste from the Seechewal Model to the ETP overflows and the waste water starts going into the Buddah Nullah directly, which is what the entire effort is meant to prevent,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}An MC official, requesting anonymity, said the issue arose due to the output of more liquid waste than can be treated. “The cow dung in the liquid waste settles down in these four wells and is then removed. However, dairy owners use more waste than can be processed. This overwhelms the system. The drain that takes liquid waste from the Seechewal Model to the ETP overflows and the waste water starts going into the Buddah Nullah directly, which is what the entire effort is meant to prevent,” he said.
{{/usCountry}}He said that a dairy unit should only discharge 100 liters of waste water per cattle, as per the pollution control board norms. “The complex has around 13,000 cattle. This means the total dairy liquid waste must be 1.3 MLD. The ETP has the capacity of 2.5 MLD, which is more than sufficient. But the dairy units waste more water which overwhelms the entire system,” he said.
MP Seechewal said that he closed the pipe that was meant to take the waste water into the Buddha Nullah in case the four wells overflow. “However, they have been disposing of their cow dung into the wells that have jammed the drain that is supposed to take the liquid waste to the ETP. The well remains overflowing and the cow dung starts running into the Buddha Nullah. They should stop disposing of cow dung into the drains to solve the problem,” he said.
Municipal commissioner Neeru Katyal Gupta said, “We met a delegation of dairy owners. We are in the process of finding a resolution to the problem.”
The MC chief said that at the bottom of the problem was the issue of cow dung. “Once cow dung is removed from the liquid waste, the system will be able to function effectively,” she said.