CHENNAI: Shortly after taking oath of office and secrecy, Mayor Saidai S Duraisamy had announced that resolving Chennai’s garbage disposal issue was high on his priority list. Here’s a lesson from history when the AIADMK was in power in 2003. The experiment was conceived, only it approach was skewed.“We realised our mistake. We realised that we had put the cart ahead of the horse,” recalls M P Vijayakumar, the then Chennai Corporation Commissioner, now retired from civil service. “We had announced in May 2003 that Chennai would be dustbin free by Pongal of 2004. We removed all the 13,000 dustbins in phases and put in place a proper system of source collection of garbage in tricycles. The micro planning was done in such a way that the conservancy worker would visit the household at a stipulated time that is convenient to the house maids.”The door-to-door collection was implemented in 5.5 lakh households in the city within three months, Vijayakumar says. “For any process of handling waste, it has to start from door to door collection. It was a challenging task,” says the officer who led the civic body in bringing about a change in the mindset of Chennai residents.“Once the source collection system was in place, the next step was to segregate the waste. We asked the households to give us the kitchen waste alone separately. The rest, consisting of plastic, metals, glass and paper, may be handed over to the conservancy worker,” he narrates. “The recyclables were sold by the conservancy worker and the income generated from that went to him. Every household implicitly obeyed and the system ran successfully for six to seven months.”The real problem raised its head then. Soon, the civic authorities realised that they did not have the facility to dispose of the segregated garbage separately. It required the setting up of a scientific landfill for which the tender process was cumbersome, the technology was not readily available and there were no successful models in the country to follow.“It all went back to status quo ante. Without proper facility at the dumpyard, any attempt to segregate garbage at source was found to be useless.”Clearly, the Mayor has his task cut out, if he is to turn the chief minister’s promise of “Clean Chennai, Clean Administration” into a reality.
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