Bhubaneswar waste hill raises bigger stink
A giant hill of garbage in Odisha’s capital Bhubaneswar has brought back stinking memories of India’s tallest waste pile in Ghazipur along the Delhi-Uttar Pradesh border. Over 50,000 tonnes of solid waste accumulated over the last six months has sent nausea levels soaring and pollution alarms ringing, apart from prompting people to consider moving out of the neighbourhood. The volume of filth has even become a political weapon for the opposition before the 2024 elections.
With a Sainik School a stone’s throw away and fast expanding neighbourhoods in its vicinity, the heap of waste is a tall and telling monument to the state’s urban administration’s insensitivity to people’s plight. It also is a tale of failed promises by the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation which saw the crisis building over the last two years.
Rated one of the country’s most liveable cities, Bhubaneswar generates close to 700 tonnes of solid waste every day, but the civic body has struggled to process it. Its earlier attempt to dispose of it at another site on the outskirts of the capital ran into resistance from villagers, forcing the municipality to deposit all its waste at a transit point. This, in the absence of adequate processing capacity, grew into a problem of gigantic proportions. What’s appalling is the state pollution board stood a mute spectator without even bothering to check its impact on the water and air of the city.
The tendency to handle solid waste through unscientific landfill methods, which is at the heart of the problem, is not limited to Bhubaneswar. According to Swachh Bharat Mission data, in the 2,035 wards of Odisha’s 115 urban local bodies, door to door collection and source segregation is 100 percent. It stated that out of the 1,721 tonnes per day (TPD) of collection, over 1,500 TPD gets processed.
However, the auditor general said in 2022 that only a tenth of the waste was processed between 2015 and 2020 and most of it was dumped at landfills. The poor pace of processing was attributed to inadequate infrastructure and lack of appropriate technology adoption. Domestic waste, however, is only one part of the problem; the huge waste generated by businesses is a far bigger challenge. Central government data says there are 86 dumping sites in Odisha which hold about 40 lakh tonnes of legacy waste and none of it has come under remediation action. The Bhubaneswar crisis is only a tip of the bigger problem.