After spending crores on study tours within the country and abroad, councillors and officials of the Chandigarh civic body are scheduled to take another junket — this time to Goa, at an estimated cost of Rs 14.72 lakh for a four-day trip — to study the state’s waste management project.
Sources said that an agenda in this regard will be tabled in the General House meet of the civic body that is scheduled to take place on July 29.
Interestingly, the councillors from Chandigarh have already so far visited the top three cleanest cities as per the Swachh Survekshan 2021 — Indore in Madhya Pradesh, Surat in Gujarat, and Vijaywada in Andhra Pradesh.
Baljinder Singh Bittu, the chairman of FOSWAC, said, “The councillors and officials looks for new places to enjoy excursions on public funds. Yet these tours yield no results.”
He stated that the councillors had decided to undertake an in-person visit to Goa, despite all the required information being available on the internet.
As per the agenda that will be tabled on July 29, the councillors and officials from UT want to visit a plant in Goa with a capacity to process 250 metric tonnes per day (MTD) of municipal solid waste. This when Chandigarh produces around 550 MTD (200 tonnes of dry waste and 350 tonnes of wet waste), which is more than double the capacity of the plant they want to visit.
The official agenda states that “after taking over the garbage processing plant in May 2020, the MC is still in the process of finalizing various technologies for processing dry and wet waste from the existing available technologies like composting, bio-methanation, RDE, pyrolisis, gasification and waste to energy etc.”
It further adds, “The Solid Waste Plant of the city of Goa is quite effective in dealing with the waste with minimum inert material going to the landfill site. It is, therefore, proposed that a study tour of the councillors be arranged to visit Goa Municipal Corporation to have a first-hand knowledge of the working/processing of solid waste in the city of Goa, where approximately 250 tonnes of wet & dry waste is treated.”
Scores of tours from public funds have been undertaken by the councillors and officials in the past as well in the name of waste management. However, Chandigarh’s position in the swacchta rankings has been slipping.
Tours with no results
Councillors and elected representatives from the UT have in the past also visited Singapore, Bangkok, Germany, and Italy, besides visiting various states within the country on study tours to study waste management.
For example, in 2006, the UT councillors visited Germany, Austria and Italy to study the garbage processing plants there. However, those visits turned out to be futile as the garbage processing plant that was set up in the city had to be shut down.
In October 2015, the then Municipal Commissioner, Bhawna Garg, and then Joint Commissioner Rajiv Gupta visited Coimbatore to study the solid waste management. They came out with reports on segregation of garbage at door-to-door level. But yet again, nothing was ever implemented on the ground.
Records show that UT councillors have also made visits to Ahemdabad, Surat , Nagpur, Indore, Pune, Mumbai, Vishakhapatnam , to name a few, to study the waste management plants there. But again, nothing changed on the ground with the waste problem only deteriorating in Chandigarh.