Smart city?: Garbage spillovers in Jalandhar city risk spread of monsoon ailments

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, July 16

Even as the city residents are lurking under the threat of an imminent third wave of Covid-19, the huge spillovers of the garbage in the entire city during the ongoing monsoon season too is posing a huge risk of causing various seasonal ailments.

Since garbage is not being daily picked from the dumping sites, it often tends to spread to almost double the designated area. At many places, the filth gets spread on the roads causing a huge inconvenience to the passersby, especially the pedestrians. Stray cattle and dogs add to the menace and cause even more nuisance.

The biggest eyesore in the city is the dumping site just along the cremation ground in Model Town. The garbage covers the entire parking lot of the visitors coming to perform the last rites of their loved ones. The stench emanating from the site, especially during the ongoing humid and rainy season, further causes more annoyance.

The Municipal Corporation has recently got constructed a U-shaped wall in the centre of the fish market. Even since this wall got raised, the volume of garbage being dumped here has increased which has started troubling not just the shopkeepers of the fish market, but also the commuters along the old GT Road and owners of other shops near the area.

Sukhbir Singh, who owns a shop, on the GT Road, said: “Now everyone thinks that it is their right to throw the litter here. So the entire area has become so messy and unwelcoming. With Covid danger still on mind, shoppers are avoiding visiting any filthy area over fear of contracting infections. Even more serious is the issue that no proper daily waste lifting is being done by the MC safai karamcharis”.

No door-to-door waste segregation for a year

The Municipal Corporation officials who had been spreading awareness on door-to-door segregation of waste for quite sometime earlier have now completely stopped carrying on the drive. The wet waste from the kitchen and plastic and other dry stuff are going into the cart of the garbage collectors in one bucket. The garbage collectors too are selectively picking up whatever re-saleable scrap that they are finding and eventually dumping it off all together at the dumping sites. The MC vehicles pick the entire waste and take to the Wariana dumping site.

Except for two small sites, Birring and Dakoha, where a limited amount of waste from the nearby areas is being dumped, no other area is involved in the compost making technology. “Here the kitchen waste goes into a pit and is then used as organic manure for plants. The entire city is recklessly dumping the landfills and causing environmental damage,” said Jalandhar Central Congress MLA Rajinder Beri.

Most residents are of the opinion that till the times IAS officer Aashika Jain served in the city, she remained involved in the waste segregation campaign and had even started imposing fines on households not following the directions. “Since she got transferred last year, no other official from the MC is paying a heed on the issue”, said Vicky, a garbage collector.

Meanwhile, as the tenure of the present government is coming to an end, it is now that the officials have started expediting the plan for bio-mining at Wariana dumping site. “The tenders for the project have got opened and we expect the work to start at the site in the next 20 days”, MLA Beri said.

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