MARGAO
With the Margao Municipal Council caught napping on addressing the Sonsodo imbroglio, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has called for a meeting of the High Powered Coordination Committee (HPCC) headed by him to discuss the entire gamut of issues plaguing the waste dumping site on May 22.
The meeting to be chaired by the Chief Minister at the conference hall, GST Bhavan, Altinho-Panaji, will be attended by Urban Development Minister Vishwajit Rane, the three MLAs Digambar Kamat, Vijai Sardesai and Reginaldo Lourenco, besides the Margao Municipal Chairperson Damu Shirodkar and other officials.
The meeting has been convened by the Chief Minister and comes against the backdrop of the telephonic conversation Goa Forward chief and Fatorda MLA Vijai Sardesai had with the Chief Minister on Wednesday on the worsening situation at Sonsodo.
HPCC Member Secretary and Margao Municipal Chief Officer, Srinet Kothwale has sent notices of the meeting to the committee members with a request to attend the meeting.
Incidentally, Kothwale in the meeting notice has stated that the Chief Minister and the chairman of the HPCC constituted for setting up of Solid Waste Management facilities at Sonsodo on design, build, own, operate, and transfer (DBOOT) basis, has convened the meeting.
Strange it may seem, but true that the HPCC was set up over a decade ago when former Chief Minister Digambar Kamat was the Chief Minister. Sadly, the Sonsodo imbroglio seemed far from over.
While work on the remediation of the Sonsodo legacy dump executed by the Goa Waste Management Corporation (GWMC) has ended, the inert and the RDF is yet to be carted away from the site till date.
That’s not all. A solution seemed to have eluded the daily handling of the wet waste generated in the city, with the Margao Municipal Council either transporting the wet waste to the Saligao waste treatment plant or is dumping the waste inside the Sonsodo waste management shed.
What has raised many a question in the corridors of the civic body is that the Action Plan submitted by the municipality in the High Court has not been implemented as evident in the recent fire incident since the MMC had failed to set up the firefighting mechanism in place as per the High Court order.
