Waste management: When the stink gets in the way

Solid waste dumping site in urban area posing health risks for residents.

RAWALPINDI:

Dumping of solid waste in open public places by civic authorities has been posing a serious health risk to the residents of three dhokes (villages) in the garrison city.

The authorities of the Chaklala and Rawalpindi cantonment boards have been dumping waste in their localities, causing environmental and health hazards for the inhabitants.

This practice has been continuing for over four decades turning a 10-acre area into a waste dumping site in the limits of Dhoke Gujran Chakra, Dhoke Mustaqeem and Bhatta Chowk of Rawalpindi and Chaklala cantonments.

This callousness on the part of the authorities of the two cantonments triggered a protest by residents of the three localities on Tuesday. They dispersed only after the intervention of the Rawalpindi Cantonment Board (RCB) station commander and other senior officials.

The residents maintained that the waste dumping in the residential area by the civic authorities has been spreading diseases. They claimed that cases of infectious diseases like hepatitis had been on the rise in the area.

Cantonment authorities have miserably failed to ensure proper waste disposal.

“Cantonment authorities have been dumping here since 1960 as the location was at a distance from the urban population,” said Advocate Chaudhry Muhammad Ijaz, a resident of the area.

Ijaz, who is pleading a petition filed by the residents in courts against the issue, added that with the increase in population, the residents began to raise their voices against the waste dumping.

He said they filed a petition before the Lahore High Court Rawalpindi bench, but the matter was referred to Punjab Environmental Tribunal.

The case is still pending, though the tribunal has restrained the cantonment authorities from burning the waste in the open. The tribunal issued an arrest warrant for RCB Executive Officer Rana Manzoor Ahmed for violating the order.

Ahmed said that a waste management plant would not solve the issue since “they [people] might have a problem with the incineration at the plant”. Besides, he argued, the plant would cost approximately Rs35 million.

Ijaz maintained that all relevant rules for waste dumping — to dig an eight-foot deep hole, use a truck to dump the waste into the hole, covering the area with mud and spraying insecticide — have been violated by the cantonment authorities. “The area has been turned into heaps of waste, thanks to the open dumping”, he said.

On the possibility of shifting the dump site elsewhere, Ahmed said they have been searching for an alternative dumping site for the last one-and-a-half year and as soon as one they identify a place, the current site would be shifted. “We recently advertised for a piece of 200 to 250 kanals land away from the residential areas,” he said adding that the present site would be converted into a housing scheme.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 7^th, 2012.