Residents of Nakaravavi village, on the outskirts of Rajkot, have been blocking the road to the Nakaravadi landfill site since Monday afternoon in protest of leachate from the site allegedly mixing with local streams and rivers.
This has affected municipal solid waste disposal operations in Rajkot as protestors haven’t allowed trucks loaded with solid waste to go to the site.
Devang Desai, municipal commissioner of Rajkot, told The Indian Express. “We tried to persuade them, saying that we will address the problem. However, they blocked the trucks late on Monday night. They did the same on Tuesday morning also.”
Desai sent a team of Rajkot Municipal Corporation officers to Nakravadi to persuade the residents to allow the resumption of waste disposal operations. “Due to heavy rain, surface water is mixing with leachate. However, the leachate is not on a scale comparable with the Pirana dumping site in Ahmedabad. Nonetheless, we will suck the leachate out and dispose of it properly,” said the commissioner.
“RMC collects around 700 to 750 metric tonnes of municipal solid waste from Rajkot every day. The under-construction waste-to-energy plant is likely to take time till March next year to commence operations. Presently, we are not able to process all the waste daily. Thus, some waste lies in a dump, creating the problem,” he added.
Meanwhile, door-to-door garbage collection operations in the city were carrying on per usual. “Refuge transfer stations can handle such disruptions,” Desai said.
After complaints from villagers, a team from the Gujarat Pollution Control Board’s regional office in Rajkot had rushed to Nakaravadi on Monday for a spot inspection. “Our team observed that leachate was streaming into local streams as the volumes of leachate had increased, apparently due to the recent heavy rains. The landfill site has leachate collection tanks but they are not proving sufficient,” said BM Makwana, regional officer (RO) of GPBC in Rajkot.
Makwana said that no leachate is “permitted” to mix with local water bodies. “Based on observations of our team which made the site visit yesterday, we are preparing a report which we will forward to the tour head office. In the meantime, we have instructed the RMC to immediately prevent leachate from flowing into streams,” said the RO.
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