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Journalism of Courage
THE CBI is probing the sale and disposal of biomedical waste as part of its alleged corruption case at Kolkata’s R G Kar Medical College Hospital, the epicentre of a political firestorm after last month’s rape and murder of a medical intern there.
A little-known company, SNG Envirosolutions, could hold one key to this in the manner it grew to handle up to 70% of waste from government hospitals across the state, including at RG Kar, without owning a single waste treatment plant, in violation of its contract’s terms, an investigation by The Indian Express has revealed.
Records show that in 2019, the company, owned by Kolkata businessman S P Singh, won the contract by tying up with a Delhi firm that owned a treatment plant in UP.
At a daily rate of Rs 8-9 per bed — there are an estimated 80,000 government hospital beds across the state — SNG collected tonnes of hospital waste daily for 44 months relying on a sub-contract with its rival. All this while, SNG operated from a “table” in the premises of one its key investors, a business family of Kolkata.
The government terminated SNG’s contract in June 2023, when the sub-contractor pulled out. Within three months, SNG set up its first treatment plant in the state — and was awarded a fresh contract.
When contacted by The Indian Express, Rajiva Sinha, who was the state’s Health Secretary when SNG won the contract, said that “everything went by the book”. He added that the rules allowed companies without treatment plants, “provided they set up the facilities within the prescribed deadline of four months from getting environmental clearance (EC).” SNG, however, did not complete the EC application process for years.
Asked about this, Sinha, who is now the state’s Election Commissioner, said: “If a company violated any condition later, my successors in the Health (department) must have taken appropriate steps.”
Incidentally, Sinha was the Calcutta Environment Improvement Project director in 2006 when another company owned by SP Singh, SNG Mercantile, was hired as a consultant for a project funded by the Asian Development Bank. In 2016, Sinha led a state business delegation to Italy with SP Singh as a member.
When contacted, S P Singh blamed Covid for the delay in setting up waste treatment plants. “We took serious losses after providing critical waste disposal services during Covid after we won the bid following every rule. This was a genuine joint venture and the partners paid equally for the bank guarantee,” Singh told The Indian Express.
However, records show that soon after the bid, Singh, through a web of transactions, got personal ownership in the joint venture and reduced his consortium partners’ stakes.
It was in February 2019 that the West Bengal Health department floated a tender for hospital waste disposal seeking bids from Common Bio-Medical Waste Treatment Facility (CBMWTF) operators for 13 zones covering the state.
Nine months later, the contract for nine zones was awarded to a joint venture vehicle of SP Singh’s SNG Mercantile and Delhi-based Spectrum Waste Solutions. “We did it for the tender as per the requirement. Our companies had no prior business links,” said Spectrum Waste’s director-stakeholder Md Ziaurrahman Khan.
At the rate of Rs 8-9 per hospital bed per day, the contract entailed daily collection of bio-medical waste from hospitals, transporting it to treatment facilities, incinerating constituents that cannot be recycled and disinfecting the rest, mostly plastic materials, for shredding and recycling.
Soon after the consortium bagged the contract, S P Singh’s dormant family-owned company SNG Envirosolutions transferred all its 10,000 shares equally to SNG Mercantile and Spectrum Waste to become the consortium’s 50:50 joint venture vehicle.
Within a year, SNG Envirosolutions issued 9.9 lakh preferential shares to multiple investors and S P Singh himself, reducing the stake of consortium partners SNG Mercantile and Spectrum Waste to 0.5% each. Under the new shareholding in 2020, S P Singh’s direct stake in SNG was 24% while the remaining 75% went to investors.
The lead investor with a 50% stake, Silvercross Marketing, is owned by the families of Himanshu Ajmera and Girish Mehta, Kolkata-based commodities brokers. Ajmera also issued an NOC to SNG for using “a table space” to run its businesses in an apartment he owned in Kolkata’s Ballygunge.
Ajmera did not respond to requests for comment. Mehta said their company “exited” SNG recently.
Under the 2019 contract, SP Singh had four months to set up nine treatment plants — one in each zone — from the time it obtained Environment Clearances (EC) for construction.
Instead, SNG Envirosolutions struck a deal with Hyderabad-based Medicare Environment Management, the company that got the contract for the remaining 30% of government hospital waste.
Krishnendu Datta, who led Medicare’s West Bengal operations in 2019, and his successor Snehanshu Chakraborty, declined to comment on the details of the “internal arrangement” with SNG.
A senior Medicare employee said the “offer” of a subcontract to treat the waste lifted by SNG “made sense” since it was also “endorsed by the state government as an interim measure” — a fact corroborated by Health department records.
The “internal arrangement” functioned until a PIL in August 2022 challenged SNG’s contract citing Bio-Medical Waste Management Rules, 2016, which require a person or a company to be the owner or to be in control of a treatment facility to qualify as its operator.
The PIL, filed by Kolkata-based social worker Prabir Das, flagged allegations of dumping hospital waste by the company in municipal dump sites.
By now, the state Health department had served four notices — between December 2020 and August 2022 — to SNG for not setting up the treatment plants.
“In all those years, the company completed EC applications for only two plants, instead of nine, and all we did was to wait, watch and send periodic notices to be put in the file. But the department had to act after the PIL was admitted,” said a Health official.
In October 2022, the department terminated SNG’s contract for failing to set up CBMWTFs — without serving the two-month notice under the E-tender condition.
Within days, SNG moved the Calcutta High Court against the termination, and the state missed the court date.
On May 31, 2023, Medicare informed the Health department about the termination of its sub-contract with SNG from June 1. SNG sought one month to “resolve” the issue.
As an interim measure, the Health department transferred all zones allotted to SNG to Medicare on June 2.
Asked if SNG passed on the waste it collected to Medicare’s treatment plants, S P Singh said: “Every (waste) bag is barcoded and can’t be tampered with. Official site inspections showed that the allegations of dumping waste in municipal bins were totally false. Our books will show all the payments made, with GST, to Medicare.” He declined to comment on the amount SNG billed the Health department under the contract and how much it paid Medicare under the sub-contract.
With the company out of business, the work on SNG’s treatment plants moved rapidly and the first unit was ready in just two months. On June 30, 2023, the West Bengal Pollution Control Board (WBPCB) issued a ‘Consent to Operate’ certificate for the first treatment plant in Bankura.
Asked if the Board took any action against the company for lifting bio-medical waste for 44 months without a licence, WBPCB chairman Dr Kalyan Rudra and member-secretary Rajesh Kumar declined to comment.
On August 11, 2023, a fresh order by the Health department assigned Bankura, Bishnupur, Purulia and Murshidabad zones to SNG. Principal secretary (Health) Nigam did not respond to queries asking why the Health department took so long to revoke SNG’s contract and whether it considered its violations while signing an agreement with it afresh.
