It was a dirty secret that the Corporation of the City of Panaji kept quite well. That was until the parade ground at Campal was handed over to Goa State Urban Development Agency (GSUDA) to be converted into a football stadium for 5,000 spectators. You can’t build a football field on a pile of garbage. The pile, which had gradually accumulated under the nose of the CCP, had to be sifted and moved. And that’s when Panaji, or at least Campal suddenly became aware that it had a huge garbage dump in its midst.
What one witnesses as one drives past the ground is a huge pile of garbage. It’s almost like a tidal wave waiting to engulf the residences on the other side of the road. With the monsoon a day or two away residents will be enveloped in a cloud of putrefying odour and will be lucky if disease does not emanate from here.
This pile of garbage represents the collective failure of present and past corporators, who failed to put their heads together to find a more lasting solution to the city’s garbage problem. It also represents the failure of the MLAs controlling the CCP who made promises about building treatment plants but never delivered. The waste dump also symbolizes the utter failure of governments, past and present, which put politics ahead of governance.
Panaji’s garbage woes started in 2005 when the dump at Curca-Bambolim was closed and for the first time the capital city had to deal with its waste. Ten years later the city has composting stations and sorting centres at various locations with the largest one located at Patto Plaza. Plans to construct a mini-plant behind Heera Petrol Pump near the bus stand have been cleared by the National Green Tribunal, but a large treatment plant, like the one constructed at Saligao-Calangute, continues to elude the city and the CCP.
The presence of so much garbage at the parade ground also puts a question mark on segregation at source. For years now, residents of the city have been segregating their garbage at source while the CCP has been mixing it up at the Campal ground. Even though the high court had ordered a stay on dumping of garbage at Campal ground in 2008, the practice continued surreptitiously. The matter was raised in the Assembly in August 2014 by St Cruz MLA Babush Monserrate, who always had an eye on the Panaji seat, but despite controlling the CCP for over a decade, failed to find a permanent solution to the problem.
How one views the garbage problem depends on where one is located. A visit to Patto Plaza, where the odour of decomposing garbage blows with the wind (apologies to Bob Dylan) will give one a sense of urgency in resolving this issue. However, for those living in the city the problem becomes acute only when the garbage unit of the CCP goes on strike. Residents have contributed their mite by segregating garbage and operating the composting stations during the early years of the problem, but this is essentially the headache of the CCP and the government. The CCP and the government need to get their act together to realise the dream of a treatment plant for Panaji.
