Waste treatment plant to be inaugurated by July 15

Gurdeep Singh Mann

Tribune News Service

Bathinda, July 4

The state’s first municipal solid waste treatment plant, constructed after a long legal battle in the National Green Tribunal (NGT) that local residents contested, is ready. The plant, built in private public partnership mode, is likely to be inaugurated by Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal by the middle of this month.

While the state government considers the completion of plant as an achievement, the local residents have strong apprehensions that the plant would add to the woes of the already polluted city. A tributary of Sirhind Canal running along the site of the garbage treatment plant would get affected, which provides water for drinking as well as irrigation.

The construction work in the first phase has been completed at a cost of Rs 28 crore in 30 acres where the city has been dumping its garbage for the last three decades.

With the first phase of the project nearing completion, the plant will process the municipal waste of Bathinda as well as 18 other urban local bodies that amounts to around 350 tonnes per year. In later stages, the garbage would be processed to produce power as well as other useful byproducts.

The project had remained in the thick of a controversy since its inception. In August 2012, a resident of Bathinda, Captain Mal Singh had moved the NGT contesting the approval to set up a plant that the State Environmental Assessment Agency had given. People accused the Municipal Corporation Bathinda of not following the environment- friendly norms and not taking measures to handle the garbage littered on the site scientifically.

Interestingly, the MCB officials were pulled up by the principal bench of the NGT for making false claims at a tribunal regarding the presence of a green belt around the dumping site while there were no saplings planted. During repeated hearings, the NGT asked Punjab to set up a plant at Bathinda as a model for others to follow. All the cases filed against garbage treatment plants across Punjab were clubbed together and the state was directed to create a precedence in the form of the Bathinda solid waste management plant.

Municipal Commissioner Dalwinderjit Singh said the project was almost complete and would be inaugurated by July 15. Work on second phase too would be started soon, he added.

With the starting of the project, waste dumps that keep lying by the roadside would be reduced to a great extent which will bring respite from the stench to the city residents.