MARGAO
As the dust raised by the just-concluded Assembly election is slowly settling down, Madgavkars and Fatordekars may have a question or two to ask the politicos “ will Sonsodo receive utmost priority from the netas and the government that would take over the reins of office after March 10?
Right from Chief Minister Pramod Sawant to Deputy Chief Minister Manohar Ajgaonkar and the sitting MLAs - Opposition leader Digambar Kamat and Vijai Sardesai - and not to mention their opponents, all had all promised to resolve the Sonsodo imbroglio during the campaign for the just-concluded polls.
Sadly, come elections and the burning garbage issue plaguing the commercial capital takes the centre stage, only to be relegated to the background post-polls.
Otherwise, consider this. Since the time Fomento Green withdrew from Sonsodo by handing over the waste treatment plant to the Margao Municipal Council exactly two years ago, the civic body has been struggling to treat the daily waste generated in the commercial capital.
In fact, thousands of tons of waste is presently stacked inside the Sonsodo garbage plant for want of treatment worth its name in the last two years. The Sonsodo plant lies saturated and choked with around 4,500 tons of waste as the civic body has run out of ideas on how to go about the treatment of the waste over the last two years.
That’s not all. Margao Municipal Council’s ambitious project to set up two 25TPD bio-methanation plants at Sonsodo had not moved forward. Blame it on the government’s apathy or the civic body’s lethargy, the proposal is gathering dust in the records books of the government, with the MMC yet to receive the nod from the panel of experts.
What’s interesting to note is that remediation of the Sonsodo legacy dump has not commenced to date. The Goa Waste Management Corporation had planned to resume remediation of the Sonsodo legacy dump by December-end and complete the entire project by around February-March, 2022.
Sadly, remediation of the dump has not resumed at Sonsodo to date, with the contractor engaged by the Goa Waste Management Corporation (GWMC) transporting the Refuse Derive Fuel (RDF) to the cement factories in neighbouring Karnataka.
GWMC Managing Director Levinson Martins informed that priority is being accorded to transport the RDF from Sonsodo before the resumption of the remediation process. He, however, exuded confidence that the Sonsodo legacy dump will be remediated before the onset of monsoons.
