The garbage challenge

It’s been a couple of weeks since the waste from Jowai, approximately 63 kms away from Shillong was brought to the state capital to be dumped at Marten. The irony here is stark. It means that 49 years after statehood our political and social leadership failed to envision that people would no longer be able to dispose of even their kitchen waste and grass and weeds etc., within their own compounds. The question therefore is why the need for a waste management system beyond our respective households? There are two important reasons here. First, homes are built without any specifications and without having to adhere to a set of guidelines such as having enough space for a septic tank, and organic/kitchen waste disposal pit. Hence every space became built up. Secondly, forty years ago households did not generate as much plastic waste (plastic bags, food packages, paper, aluminium foil etc,). Those days electronic and metal waste was unknown. Civilisation has introduced many items to make life easier for humans but it has not shown a sustainable model for waste reduction, waste management and waste recycling.
The purpose of governance is to envision the state and its future needs and not just to deal with immediate issues and to fire-fight. Indeed, fire-fighting is what is happening with the garbage from Jowai since there isn’t any place for dumping that mess in the vicinity. The problem today is that even recycling plastic and metal garbage has other consequences. All talk about cement companies buying up plastic waste has had no visible results.
Meghalaya Government needs to take hard decisions based on its own experiences with garbage. First, there has to be one uniform rule for building permissions within and outside municipalities. Houses must have space for dumping organic waste. That must be a pre-condition for granting building permission. Landfills are an outdated idea. Other cities have democratised waste management by making localities responsible for managing their own waste through use of waste convertors installed locally. The Meghalaya Government has to ban the use of plastic carry bags and call upon all commercial establishments, petty shopkeepers and hawkers to cooperate in this initiative. A call must be given to reduce waste as much as possible. People generally don’t think much about waste because once it goes out of their homes their responsibilities are over. It’s time to make every household responsible for the waste it generates and to pay by weight and not just a monthly collection charge which only goes towards paying salaries to waste collectors and maintenance of trucks. The public is actually not paying the cost of managing the waste at Marten. There has to be some strategic thinking on this issue.