For the past several years, one topic that has been dominating conversations in the State is garbage and its treatment. Be it the mounds of waste at the dump at Sonsoddo on the outskirts of Margao, or the much-awaited Bainguinim waste plant near Old Goa, or the proposed waste treatment plants at Saligao and Curchorem. The topic has been debated at taverns, homes, offices and the Legislative Assembly. Reams have been written about it and MLAs and citizens have travelled to Europe at government expense in search of a way out, but a solution has eluded the State. The problem remains and keeps growing, keeping pace with the growing mounds of rubbish at the Sonsoddo dump that could soon tower over the neighbouring natural hills if no action is taken soon.
If Margao has been battling the Sonsoddo dump and its related problems, Panjim has not been without its fair share of problems related to garbage, especially in the past few days. The State capital may not be facing a crisis of the kind that the commercial capital faces, but in the last few days that garbage has remained uncleared in the city, there was a faint stink emanating from various quarters of the city, and even some worms sneaking out of the rotting garbage. Admittedly the stink this time wasn’t as bad as it has been in the past when the garbage collectors have gone on strike in the city, but the stench did hang for a while in the air.
The municipal corporation of a capital city cannot allow itself to be held to ransom every few months by the garbage collectors. It has to ensure that its residents, who pay for the service of garbage being collected from their doorstep, the business community, the floating population and the tourists that visit the city are not inconvenienced. While the municipality has that responsibility, a very relevant question that needs to be asked in Panjim is whether the Corporation of the City of Panaji cannot pay its garbage collectors a more reasonable wage than what it has been currently paying?
The demand that the workers are making for a hike in their daily wages is not unreasonable. When the CCP collects a fee from the residents of the city exclusively for garbage collection, surely it can afford to pay the garbage collectors a wage that can be deemed reasonable. Rs 221 a day for the garbage collector works out to Rs 6630 a month if he/she works through the month without taking a single day off. The garbage collectors were demanding for almost double that, but surely they too should realize that there has to be a point at which both parties have to come to an understanding. Even after the government increased the daily wages to Rs 323 a day, the workers union remained adamant on their figure of Rs 409 a day, but later relented and accepted the Rs 323.
Every dispute can be resolved through negotiation and this can happen only if both parties can sit across the table and arrive at a consensus. This consensus seems to have been eluding the CCP and the workers union for months and this finally led the government to bring garbage collection and all CCP services under the Essential maintenance Services Act (ESMA) that will make a strike by garbage collectors illegal. Even till Thursday evening garbage had not been cleared from many areas of the city and piles of waste were seen on the roadside in the centre of the city. It finally took the CCP and the workers union most of Thursday evening, going well into the night, to come up with a solution to the problem and accept the wage fixed by the government. But just how lasting this solution will be cannot be determined at the present time. Couldn’t the two parties have reached the same solution earlier, before the garbage in the city was allowed to rot? For the past many months and years, everybody has been talking of and about garbage but Goa is still very far from finding a solution to the problem. Whatever little is done are just short term solutions that can never be extended to the long term.
