Swachh Bharat: Just 20% of urban waste gets treated properly

India’s pollution watchdog the Central Pollution Control Board has woken up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat call and has asked states to ensure that all waste generated in cities is properly disposed off.

Updated on: Dec 10, 2014, 24:38:00 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s pollution watchdog the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has woken up to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Swachh Bharat call and has asked states to ensure that all waste generated in cities is properly disposed off.

The move comes after the National Green Tribunal pulled up the board for failing to enforce the Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 2000 that provides for proper segregation and disposal of the waste generated in cities.

This will prove a challenge for over 5,000 municipal bodies in India as only 27,000 tonnes of 1.44 lakh tonnes of garbage generated daily gets properly treated. Only about 40% of the garbage generated every day is picked up.

“Many of the urban local bodies do not have capacity to treat so much waste,” a senior pollution board official said, adding that funding for the waste treatment projects was minuscule.

A CPCB report submitted to the green tribunal pointed out that many of the state pollution control boards have failed to submit status reports on implementation of the rules since 2000 when it was notified – resulting in a limited amount of the information required by the CPCB to enforce the rules brought by the previous NDA government to ensure cleanliness in cities through a house-to-house collection mechanism.

The report shows that even after 15 years, many state governments have failed to introduce the house-to-house collection system – which is implemented by Gujarat, Goa and Himachal Pradesh.

Following the NGT rap, the CPCB issued a notification under the Water Act and Air Act making municipal bodies responsible for implementing the rule and made state pollution control nodal offices for monitoring the implementation of a roadmap for implementation of the rules. The road map will then be submitted to the green tribunal for further directions, CPCB officials said.

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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