Team Herald
MARGAO: With no other option left, the Margao Municipal Council has now decided to transport the waste piled up in the old treatment plant at Sonsoddo to Saligao treatment plant on a daily basis. This exercise is most likely to commence from next week.
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The situation at the Sonsoddo site is going out of control and with no place to dump the waste generated on a daily basis, the civic body is forced to take the above step, wherein the Goa Solid Waste Management too has permitted them to transport the waste to Saligao.
A few days ago the Shadow Council for Margao (SCM) had charged the civic body and the concerned authority for adopting cured methods of disposing Sonsoddo’s legacy waste by dumping in low lying areas without taking measures to prevent the pollution of the ground water table.
SCM had remarked that the only treatments of waste that can be witnessed at Sonsoddo are the 100-odd dogs feasting on the wet waste, and the hundreds of birds feeding on the garbage at the plant.
“Waste inside the old treatment plant has piled up beyond capacity and with no place inside to dump more garbage we are forced to accommodate the garbage generated on a daily basis by making way here and there,” said Chief Officer Manuel Barreto.
He informed Herald that they have already requested the Solid Waste Management to allow them to transport the waste from the old treatment plant to Saligao.
“The concerned authorities have given us a green signal, whereby nearly 10 tonnes of waste piled up inside the old plant will be transported to Saligao on a daily basis. We are just waiting to make arrangements of trucks to transport,” informed the Chief Officer.
He is hopeful that meantime space will be created outside the plant wherein bioremediation of legacy dump is in progress.
“At the later stages we will shift the waste outside the plant,” he informed.
Reacting to the Sonsoddo issue, Ghanshyam Shirodkar said, “When I was the Chairperson, I had said that within 100 days I would clear the waste from Sonsodo. Every Chairperson needs some time to implement his ideas.”
He added that the councillors should be united to resolve such large common goals like the Sonsoddo treatment plant and legacy dump site.
Presently, the daily waste collected from around the jurisdiction of the civic body is simply dumped at the entrance neither of the plant, as there is no alternative place left neither inside nor outside.
Hardly three months have passed since the Goa Waste Management Corporation, through its blue-eyed contractor, Hindustan Waste Treatment Pvt Ltd, cleared 14,380 cu mts of accumulated waste from the Sonsoddo plant.
