Quepem municipal council to treat Ponda municipal council's garbage

PONDA: Irked with several organizations refusing to allow disposal of Ponda's garbage in their respective premises, the Ponda municipal council (PMC) is mulling on signing an agreement with Quepem municipal council (QMC) to dispose its garbage at the latter's treatment plant.
Meanwhile, after opposition was received when it tried to dispose off garbage in a private property at Curti-Ponda, the PMC has begun to dispose its garbage at a private property owned by PMC chief officer (CO) Pradeep Naik at Honda in Sattari, Naik revealed.
However, he said, this arrangement would be until the agreement with the Quepem civic body is signed. The Ponda civic body is in touch with the QMC to treat its two metric tonnes of garbage generated per day, Naik said.
QMC has a 10-metric tonne garbage treatment plant and the PMC will send two truckloads of garbage every day from its 13 wards to the Quepem site.
PMC has its own land earmarked for a garbage treatment plant at Curti-Ponda, and the civic body has also begun work of erecting a compound wall around it.
However, work could not proceed further on this.
In absence of the plant, the PMC had several times made some alternative arrangements; such as disposing the garbage in a private agricultural farm as manure, and dumping it in an open space at Curti within the jurisdiction of the Curti-Khandepar village panchayat.
The PMC had been dumping its garbage in open land owned by Hemant Verekar at Curti, but he also stopped it later, on grounds of pollution, said Nagesh Naik, deputy sarpanch of Curti-Khandepar. However, when a group of mediapersons visited the Curti garbage dumping site, several large heaps of thousands of tonnes of abandoned, unsegregated, garbage was found dumped on the surface of a large stretch of open land and a large amount of leachate was flowing from the waste.
Interestingly, the dumped garbage was not segregated and attracted a large number of cattle and stray dogs.
The leachate, which was pouring out of the dumps, was in turn, flowing into the open drain connecting a culvert at the Ponda-Borim-Usgao road junction.
It may be recalled that a recent bus accident at Curti that had injured about 18 people, was claimed to have occured due to skidding of the bus on a slippery road.
Locals said the leachate has been flowing on the road and if no action was taken, it would contaminate the ground water table.
When asked about the large heaps of abandoned garbage on private property despite the landowner's opposition to it, the deputy sarpanch, Naik, expressed his surprise at it and assured that he would conduct a site inspection soon.