Till March last year, every day for decades, all the garbage from the small Eastern Assam town of Doomdooma was dumped in a seven bigha plot of land in the town, giving rise to a hillock of waste there. Now, this plot is in the process of becoming the town’s first public park. Doomdooma town is one of five main urban areas in Eastern Assam’s Tinsukia district. For the last few years, these urban areas have been the sites of a project by the district administration to free them of ‘legacy waste’, or waste from the towns that had piled up over decades. On March 4, Swapneel Paul, Deputy Commissioner of Tinsukia, was awarded The Indian Express Excellence in Governance Award under the ‘Swachhta’ category for his initiative of clearing legacy waste and freeing up acres of land for public projects such as parks. Since 1975, Sultan Ali, 73, has lived adjacent to the plot where the waste from Doomdooma town would be dumped and says that the area had been a sea of garbage for as long as he can remember. “We have lived with the stink for years and years and it has become like a hill. But last year, I had the chance to farm on the land and now we would like it if the park is made here,” he said. Between October 2023 and March 2024, 17,000 MT of legacy waste on the site was cleared through bio-mining and segregated. According to the district administration, non-recyclable waste from there was sent to cement factories for processing into RDF (refuse-derived fuel), biodegradable waste was used for composting and inert waste was used in landfills. With the land cleared, last year, Sultan Ali was among people who grew maize on three bighas to assess if plants can grow on the land. “Since that worked out and this land is owned by the town municipal board, it is now being developed as a green park. There was a waterbody on this plot, which had been choked with waste, which we are rejuvenating and we will set up a vending zone in a part of the front area,” Bidyut Changmai, Executive Officer with the Doomdooma Municipal Board, told The Indian Express. Similar efforts to clear legacy waste and reclaim land have been undertaken in the other urban centres in the district, and the district administration estimates that 1.53 lakh MT of legacy waste has been cleared and processed and that 50 acres of land has been freed as a result. The biggest such plot was in Tingrai, where waste from Tinsukia, the district’s biggest town, was dumped. “Plastic, cloth, food from restaurants, everything was dumped here. It would stink and there were flies everywhere. I moved here after marriage 10 years ago and it has always been like this. There had even been processions by people demanding that the dumping should be stopped,” said Kamla Devi, 32, who used to live opposite the dumping site. The area is now a sprawling site for various waste management plants being set up. Kamla Devi now lives in a small room in a developing Fecal Sludge Treatment Plant in one section of the plot. The rest has been fenced off for the setting up of a compressed biogas unit by Oil India Limited. This, along with Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) being set up in the different urban centres in the district, are part of the district administration’s plan for management of current waste being generated in the towns, the next challenge for it to tackle. Tinsukia Deputy Commissioner Swapneel Paul said: “Most of the time, our projects get constrained at the local level. It is very difficult to scale up these things. The best thing from the award is that people get to know about our initiatives. The needs of the people motivated me to do this. Wherever waste was being dumped for the last few decades, the living conditions were deplorable. The dump sites were near the highways. This gives a very negative image of the town. We got 50 acres of land reclaimed. It can now be used for developmental projects. The biggest challenge was technical know-how. Bio mining was being done for the first time in the Northeast. We had to rope in IIT Guwahati to do a feasibility study. They helped us with the methodology of the disposal process".
