NEW DELHI: In 2017, North Delhi Municipal Corporation announced the establishment of a processing plant at Rani Khera to manage the growing burden of construction and demolition waste. The south corporation too has been putting up a similar facility at Bakkarwala since 2016. While the latter will take six more months to be completed, no work has started on the former. This nonchalance indicates why C&D waste is becoming a big concern in the city.
Delhi generates 6,800 tonne of C&D debris every day, more than half the daily collection of municipal waste. If unsegregated municipal waste puts an unneeded load on landfills, recyclable waste from big and small construction sites also end up on roadsides, landfills and vacant spaces, adding to the dust pollution.
Vijay Chaudhary, a resident of Bhogal in south Delhi, said, .. “It is common to see debris dumped on both the side of the Barapullah drain and in community bins in Jangpura Extension .We have complained several times, but any respite is momentary.” In Govindpuri, tonnes of C&D waste lie scattered below the Delhi Metro viaduct. A DMRC official confided, “This land was given to PWD by DMRC in March 2018 for the construction of road. The work didn’t start, and when the dumping of debris came to our notice, we wrote to the minister in charge of PWD in July 2018. The engineer-in-chief was asked to take necessary action submit an action-taken report.”
Of the waste of this type generated in the city, 2,000 tonne are sent to the plant at Burari in north Delhi, 500 to Shastri Park in east Delhi and 150 to DMRC’s C&D plant at Mundka. The rest is criminally dumped on roadsides, low lying public land and along big drains. An SDMC official explained, “The paucity of disposal sites and recycling plants, multiplicity of agencies dealing with the problem and the poor mechanism for regulating the illegal dumping of waste are responsible for the poor show so far.”
There are rules for the scientific disposal of C&D waste. Considering the discarded material a resource rather than waste, the Union environment ministry issued the Construction and Demolition (C&D) Waste Management Rules in 2016. It makes it mandatory for people generating more than 20 tonne of debris per day or 300 tonne a month to get their waste management plan approved by the local authorities before starting work.
The three municipal bodies have earmarked 168 sites for dumping construction material. And yet, as an SDMC official claimed, “The rules prescribe relevant charges for collection, transportation, processing and disposal, but people get
rid of their waste by illegally dumping it anywhere at night.”
Anumita Roy Chowdhury, executive director, research and advocacy, Centre for Science and Research, argued that the management and utilisation of C&D waste was a chain process that needed all steps to be followed if a certain result was to be achieved. “While the civic body has to ensure that the waste reaches the processing plants, private and government agencies should increase usage of recycled products processed at the waste plants. At present, concessionaires are finding it hard to sell the products, so they are only stocking the discarded material,” she noted.
Sunil Dhaiya, member of NGO Greenpeace, added, “The municipals are the enforcement bodies under the waste rules, but they fail to even keep an eye on whether people are following the construction norms. The civic bodies depend on contractors to penalise defaulters. That is not the perfect way of getting results.
By Vibha Sharma|TNN
