What a mess

With just 33 per cent of country’s urban municipal waste being treated scientifically while terming it a possible cause for major health hazard in future.

Updated on: Jan 5, 2009, 24:41:38 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With just 33 per cent of country’s urban municipal waste being treated scientifically, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has painted a grim picture of India’s urban waste management, while terming it a possible cause for major health hazard in future.

Urban India generates 48 million metric tones of waste annually, i.e. 0.4 kg per capita, but less than half of the municipal bodies have the capacity to handle the waste safely, a CAG reported tabled in Parliament recently said.

Its impact, the CAG found, was visible in deterioration of the underground water resources near landfills. The water samples lifted from areas near landfills in Delhi, Punjab and Chennai were highly contaminated because of improper management of the sites. “Similar situation could be in other states where waste was not being treated scientifically,” the report said.

Near Bhalaswa open landfill site in Delhi, where thousands of people live, the groundwater’s dissolved solids and hardness content was 800 per cent and 633 per cent, respectively, more than the desirable limits, thereby making water unfit for human consumption.

Similar was the situation near Okhla open landfill site. “The underground water of both the landfill sites has been critically contaminated with leachate generated from the sites,” the report said. Groundwater samples from handpumps in Amritsar in Punjab and Pallikaranai in Tamil Nadu were also highly contaminated.

CAG, which conducted audit at the central and state government levels on waste management, was shocked to find that most municipal bodies didn’t have any projections about future generation of urban waste and plans to handle them.

“Even the environment ministry had no data on waste generated and future projections,” the report said, asking the ministry to come up with a separate policy on management of waste. CAG also found that funds allocated for waste management in Chhattisgarh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu were diverted.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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