Dirty Mumbai: 6,400 tonnes of solid waste, 40 pc sewage go untreated

Of the 9,400 tonnes of municipal solid waste generated in Mumbai each day, the Deonar dumping ground, which has been staring at closure since 2011, receives 3,500 tonnes and Mulund dumping ground 2,200 tonnes. Neither of these dumping grounds currently in use have a waste processing unit, and mostly unsegregated and untreated garbage is simply dumped there, and the garbage catching fire due to the gases formed are common. The recently-opened Kanjurmarg dumping ground now processes 3,000 tonnes of waste. It is the city’s only scientific landfill site, where the garbage is processed and methane gas is generated. According to officials from the solid waste management department, however, the methane gas generation will still take some more months to reach a quantum, when electricity can be generated from it.

The civic body has in its 2015-16 budget proposed to acquire 126 hectares at Taloja outside Mumbai to ease the burden on existing dumping grounds, but the BMC continues to wait for the land to be transferred by the state. To increase awareness on waste management alone, the civic body has made a provision of Rs 15 crore in the 2015-16 budget. Still, waste segregation at source in the city is at a dismal 10-12 per cent.

Despite another solid waste management scheme — clean-up marshals — failing to make a visible impact in the city, the civic body is in the process of re-introducing these ‘marshals’ who can fine people for spitting and littering in public.

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“What we need is a permanent mechanism to not only segregate the waste in our homes (at source) and give incentives to such buildings, but also have permanent employees to enforce penalties on those who litter. The Sena-BJP in all these years has not come up with a policy to address industrial waste from the large informal sector that operates in the city. To make matters worse, there is a bankruptcy of ideas and institutionalisation of solid waste management — the previous AMC was interested in de-centralised waste management and the current one is interested in dumping grounds,” said Rais Shaikh, Samajwadi Party corporator.

“Clean-up marshals failed because they became corrupt and a nuisance by themselves by harassing people,” he added.

Meanwhile, the data didn’t escape political rivals either. At a press conference Friday, former chief minister Narayan Rane said, “The Swachh Bharat campaign will fail in the city as long as Shiv Sena rules it.” Interestingly, he was a Sena corporator when the Clean Mumbai campaign was launched. But high population, paucity of land and lax attitude of people are what officials from the BMC’s solid waste management department blame for the city’s low rank in the survey — something they have raise d doubts over.

“The survey has compared small as well as large cities. Navi Mumbai would amount to a ward in Mumbai, in terms of population and size. Further, according to the census report, open defecation in Mumbai is just 2 per cent, much less than Navi Mumbai. We face severe land constraints and all these factors should be looked into while doing such surveys,”
said Patil.

The other aspect that the survey considered was open defecation. According to sewerage operations department, at least 60 per cent of the city’s households are connected to sewer lines.

“Most of the unconnected households belong to illegal slums. Around 95 per cent of the developed areas (buildings) are connected to sewer lines, while the remaining are connected to septic tanks that are routinely cleaned by the civic body. We face a lot of constraints in areas that come under defence land, Bombay Port Trust and forest land to get permission to lay sewer lines. In slum areas, there is simply no place to either make public toilets or more importantly to lay new sewer connections,” said Vipinkumar Pandey, Chief Engineer, Sewerage Operations.

“We treat nearly 70 per cent of the sewage before disposing it into the sea. It is quite a challenge given the volume the city generates,” he added.

In the country’s richest municipal corporation, human waste from 36,883 households of the total 26,65,479 are disposed into open drains, according to the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment Survey of Manual Scavengers in Statutory Towns. In comparison, Raigad district that includes Navi Mumbai has 5,96,514 households, of which human waste from 2,704 goes into open drains.

Further, the BMC has made a provision of Rs 5.25 crore for pay-and-use toilets in the city this year, but women in Mumbai’s slums still defecate in the open. As many as 85 per cent of those surveyed recently said they found community toilets unsafe at night. According to the survey, 12.5 per cent of the women in Mumbai’s slums defecate in the open at night. The study titled ‘Housing, water and sanitation survey of slums in Mumbai 2015’, conducted by the International Institute of Population Sciences (IIPS), found that women preferred to take this risk to walking 58 m, the average distance of the community toilet from their homes.

The new plan

A City Sanitation Plan is being formulated by the All India Institute of Local Self-Government in Andheri. According to Prakash Patil, Deputy Municipal Commissioner, Solid Waste Management, the plan for the first ward should be ready in three months.
Former municipal commissioner Jairaj Pathak said strong decision on closure of dumping grounds, bringing private players into waste collection would go a long way in making the city cleaner.

“Deonar and Mulund dumping grounds are oversaturated and they need to be scientifically closed. More garbage should be treated scientifically at Kanjurmarg. In the BMC, solid waste management projects get relegated in the background over other pressing issues. We often forget that no matter how beautiful our drawing rooms are, if our toilets are unclean, there is no point. Mumbai wouldn’t even have come in the top 10 because of its sheer size. Part of Navi Mumbai’s waste collection and management is privatised. In BMC, the safai workers are the highest paid in the country, but often there is dereliction of work or outsourcing. If we privatise to some extent, work can be ensured,” he said.

anjali.lukose@expressindia.com