Tricity waste woes

Chandigarh is struggling to live up to its proud tagline — City Beautiful. It is placed at the 16th spot in the Swachhta rankings this year. Though it’s an improvement by four notches from last year, the scale-up fails to impress. For, it exposes the black spots marring the city’s cleanliness efforts to reclaim the coveted second spot that it had attained in 2016. Schemes have gone down the drain as waste management hurdles continue to plague the city. Prolonged arbitration with the Jaypee group, which has been entrusted with the garbage processing plant in Dadu Majra, has resulted in a below-par performance and the dumpyard is an eyesore as it overflows with untreated and hazardous waste. In addition, the faction-ridden Municipal Corporation’s endeavour to take over door-to-door garbage collection and ensuring trash segregation at source has met with a deadlock for two years.

Notably, similar woes bedevil the satellite town of Panchkula in Haryana as the dirty nullah snaking through it and the garbage hill in the dumping ground impact its steadily soaring trajectory: its rank 56 this year is up from 211 in 2017. Neighbouring Mohali in Punjab has had to settle for an embarrassing fall in the survey: it is down to rank 157 from 121 in 2017. Punjab also suffers the ignominy of having the third dirtiest town in the country: Abohar. Waterlogging is its major bane. Generally, some gains here are negated by slips there.

The authorities and residents need to clean up their act. Further complacency in dealing with the filth will cost them dearly in the coming surveys as cities are waking up to the importance of sanitation in these Covid-hit times. Piles of garbage and plastic, stinking public toilets, inadequate water supply, missing dustbins, unkempt parks, biomedical waste — a lot has to be tackled. On a positive note, as the two states inch up in overall ranking (Punjab moved up a slot to sixth position, and Haryana is second among states with less than 100 urban local bodies), the challenge is not impossible.

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