Clean New Town

Yesterday at NKDA, I held a brainstorming session on effective ways of keeping a city clean and effective ways of managing solid waste. Director General of KMC's Solid Waste Management division, Professor from UEM University, Consultant from JICA, Director General of KMDA and Engineering expert from Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation and senior officers and engineers of NKDA participated.

I mentioned that in New Town there are about 36,000 residents and 80,000 commuters. The daily solid waste generation is about 40 MT. Door to door collection takes place from households by an agency which also collects wastes from community bins at commercial establishments including hotels and markets, parks and street waste. Disposal is at Mollar ground where Salt Lake also dumps waste. Road waste on Major Arterial Road is by mechanical sweeping machines. For other roads, manual sweepers are deployed. The challenge is to have an efficient collection system 24x7 for keeping the city clean and green.

We listened to varied experiences and opinions. JICA officers said that in Japan they incinerate city solid waste as it had two advantages: waste shrinkage (burnt out portions are 5% by volume and 15% by weight) and saves landfill. In KMC, they are trying out NGOs to collect recyclables from homes. In BMC, they are taking fees from commercial units and allocating the dumps directly to recyclers against fee. Professor said app based monitoring of workers and transport is necessary. I remarked that NKDA must draw out a detailed map of all residents and commuting public and have performance oriented collection system with few innovations (give a smart phone with GPS to each worker, I said, and a central server can see how hard he is working). The Executive Engineer NKDA was tasked with creating a good plan quickly.
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