Garbage galore !

Valmiki Faleiro
 

 IFFI is past.  The present greets us with an enduring, year-round festival: garbage!  If you think that *Garbage* is of recent origin, now that Wendell and Margaret protest, you’re off bull’s eye!  Permit me to tell you an old Story of My Experiments With Garbage (no affront intended.)

 1985-87, when I happened to be President of my town’s Municipal Council, Margao’s open garbage yard at Sonsodo, by a Major District Road that wound to the historic villages of Rachol, Raia and Curtorim, was already a stinking mess. 

Our 15-member Council comprised of disparate backgrounds – builder Digambar Kamat, PWD contractor Luis Alex Cardozo, footwear trader Manohar (Babu) Azgaonkar (of Congress-backed Madgaum Vikas Samiti), the current Congress Mahila chief Monica Dias and architect Ajit Hegde (of our Madgaum Lok Samiti.)  We sure played our political games, but when it came to serious issues, the Council stood like one.  To this day, I take pride that this Council is regarded as the best Margao had post the 1969 Municipalities Act.

 Via the good offices of All India Institute of Local Self Government, we enlisted help from India’s authority on solid waste management, Dr. Attarwala.  He had close to 40 years as head of Brihanmumbai (Greater Bombay) Municipal Corporation’s garbage disposal dept.  To get an idea of the BMC and Dr. Attarwala’s standing, consider this:  BMC was 1,000 times bigger demographically and ten times budget-wise (over Rs.2,000 crores v/s about Rs.200 crores) than, not Margao, but entire Goa!

 The tall, lean, bespectacled and frugally dressed man arrived with just one assistant who shorthanded notes and doubled as lensman.  Dr. Attarwala studied Sonsodo and, over the next two days, visited every public, unused land within the municipal limits (we didn’t believe in tossing our garbage in someone else’s backyard!)

 We searched.  At the end, Dr. Attarwala concurred with my choice: the vast, fallow, low-lying land beyond the habitation frontier of Sirvodem-Margao, adjacent to where the Sewage Treatment Plant now is.

 Dr. Attarwala presented a well-documented report, replete with facts, charts and photographs, recommending short-term measures at Sonsodo and, as a lasting solution, shifting of the yard to Sirvodem.  He spelt out disposal processes to be adopted at the new site: segregation of garbage, different treatment methods for different categories of wastes and garbage … segregated landfills, incineration, chemical treatment, et al.

 The proposals involved money – from land acquisition to equipment – and as I said here before, Goa’s municipalities (including ours, which, together with Mormugao, was Goa’s first Class-A Municipality) were “toothless giants.”  Bulk of the municipality’s revenue went into salaries and pensions!

 I handed over the Dr. Attarwala Report to the State Government, with a request that the alternate site be acquired and handed over to the Municipality.  Then Minister for Urban Development, Dr. Luis Proto Barboza, must have dumped it in his garbage bin the moment our Chief Officer and I were out of his line of sight.

 The CM, then as now Pratapsing Rane, showed no less concern towards the mounting problem.  He called another of those “meetings” (from which nothing tangible ever emerged) of all eleven Municipal Presidents and Chief Officers, at the Secretariat conference room.  I was, by then, tired of even the chai and samosas of such conclaves.

 The cynic in me made me take the chair directly across the CM, or whoever the Minister who presided over such meetings, and bide time to take an opportune pot shot at the convenor’s wisdom.  (In Rane’s case, my interjections invariably added colour to his complexion, but in fairness, he always reacted in a polite fashion, with silence.)

 To discuss garbage, I was surprised to see the entire gamut of babudom, from the Chief Secretary, Mathur, down to (believe me) Capt. Rebello, the Captain of Ports!

 Dr. Proto Barboza was very much there, seated to the CM’s right, but one look told that he had long forgotten the Dr. Attarwala Report.  Rane displayed a very studious and grim concern.  After all the pearls of wisdom had spewed forth, I piped in:

 “Mr. Chief Minister, there is a workable solution: a centralized garbage plant, somewhere near Ponda, equidistant to all municipalities.  The plant must incorporate all the processes discussed – landfill, mini and maxi incinerators, composting, vermiculture, etc. A project of such magnitude cannot be left to municipalities, so launch another Govt Corporation, let’s call it “The Goa Garbage Corporation” … that way you can keep yet another of your troublesome MLAs in tow.”

 There was stunned silence.  Only Capt. Rebello’s initial burst of laughter was heard.  For entirely unrelated reasons, he quit the job and migrated overseas some time later.

Obviously, nothing material came out of that meeting, save the chai and samosas.  The State functioned that way.  Unfortunately, it still does, much the same style.

submitted to TGF by the author on Dec 11, 2005

[Valmiki Faleiro is a Margao based businessman who earlier worked as Staff Reporter for the erstwhile WEST COAST TIMES and later as Goa Correspondent with Mumbai's FREE PRESS JOURNAL Group, and the INDIAN EXPRESS newspaper.  He served as the President of the  Margao Municipality from 1985 to 1987. He has indicated that he hopes to return soon to full-time writing, with a special interest on certain aspects of Goan history.] 

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