THANE: The
Thane Municipal Corporation has proposed a door-to-door segregated
waste collection drive in their budget this year with an allocation of Rs 4 crore, wherein their solid
waste management team will manually collect waste from each home, which is not accessible by the garbage vehicles.
While the vehicles move into every lane in the city daily collecting wet and dry waste, many spots in the city, especially slum pockets have been left out of owing to narrow pathways.
With no or limited access to this civic waste disposal system, citizens seem to have thus become habituated to throwing their kitchen waste as well as non-biodegradable waste in the small storm water drains as well as the nullahs abound their homes.
In an attempt to stop this trend that has resulted in the choking of these sewerages, the Thane Municipal Corporation has now proposed a door-to-door waste collection initiative in their 2018-2019 budget.
“As part of this initiative, we will have a team of solid waste collectors, who will individually visit 300 homes and collect segregated wet and dry waste in two separate handcarts, as the vans cannot fit through these areas. While they will transfer the wet waste to the ghanta gadis, they will sell the dry waste to old paper marts,” said
Balaji Haldekar, medical officer at the civic solid waste management department. While the project is still in its proposal stage, the Thane Municipal Corporation has already started a physical survey to identify these homes that are not accessible by their garbage vehicles.
“Our team has already begun surveying every nook and corner of the city and jotting down the names of the owner of the house, their house numbers, areas and so on so that we can compile a list, rope in groups of labourers, mahila bachat groups, etc and allocate a group of 300 houses to each applicant. We have allocated a budget of Rs 4 crore for this project,” added Haldekar.
Environmentalist V Walavalkar said, “This is a feasible initiative given to local self-help groups. However, if this process is done on tendering basis like it is done for other civic projects, then it could politicised.”
