CM: Clearing legacy waste costs govt Rs 500cr annually

Panaji: Giving a glimpse into the enormous challenge involved in tackling Goa’s garbage situation, chief minister Pramod Sawant said that the state government spends Rs 500 crore every year just to tackle legacy waste and urged citizens to play a proactive role in reducing trash.
Sawant said that the government is working on a strategy to tackle this waste, which will be announced in the coming state budget.
Treating solid waste, particularly plastic, the chief minister said, has become a big challenge for Goa, particularly since people continue to dump garbage in rivers, fields, along roadsides, and in community spaces.
“People have been dumping garbage year after year, and for 50 years it just accumulated because nobody treated it. Now, our government is spending Rs 500 crore to treat this,” said Sawant. “This is not the government’s garbage, it is the people’s garbage,” said Sawant, holding previous state governments responsible for the state’s garbage mess.
Goa has around 1.1 lakh cubic metre of legacy waste spread across five sites in the state that are being taken up for treatment and remediation.
In December, the Goa Waste Management Corporation (GWMC) floated a tender, inviting bids for the remediation of waste from five dump sites at a cost of over Rs 27 crore in phase II of the legacy dump clearing project.
The Goa Waste Management Corporation has already cleared legacy dumps in Panaji, but Sawant pointed out that fresh garbage keeps piling up due to people’s lackadaisical attitude towards cleanliness.
“Please stop using plastic. We all need to resolve to decrease the amount of garbage that we generate. Let us all work to the best of our abilities to reduce the amount of garbage that we generate,” said the chief minister.
On earlier occasions, Sawant had said that people should be willing to pay for garbage management.
The high court of Bombay at Goa has also repeatedly pulled up the state for not tackling the garbage mess and even directed the Margao Municipal Council to clear the legacy garbage dump at Sonsodo by February.