Srinagar: “The city of Srinagar would be developed on the most modern lines and it will truly be transformed to be the Venice of Asia,” Omar Abdullah, former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, said while launching his election campaign in 2008.
On January 5, 2009, the British-born son of the flamboyant Farooq Abdullah, who was the Union minister for new and renewable energy during the same period, took the reins of the state administration in his own hands and ruled J&K for full six years as the eighth chief minister.
Ten years down the line, the ‘Venice’ to-be has earned a dubious distinction of being the tenth most polluted city in the world by a 2018 World Health Organisation (WHO) survey in terms of the air quality in its Global Ambient Air Pollution Database. Neither the Omar Abdullah government nor the successive PDP-BJP coalition, which the BJP ended abruptly in June, could come up with an effective solid waste disposal mechanism despite stringent warnings by the National Green Tribunal (NGT).
Miffed at the findings, the State Pollution Control Board quickly rebuffed the WHO claims. “These wrong reports which are not based on facts and figures send wrong signals to people of the country and the world,” Sidharth Kumar, chairman of J&K State Pollution Control Board, told NDTV on June 10.
The WHO survey was, however, corroborated by another study conducted by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune in collaboration with the University of Kashmir which noted that the pollution levels in Srinagar have hit dangerous levels, with one of the co-authors describing it as ‘worse than air pollution in Delhi’ on some days.
A ‘Swachh Survekshan’ conducted by the Quality Council of India also ranked Srinagar as one of the dirtiest cities in the country.
Achan dumping site
The 450-metric-tonnes of garbage dumped every day at Achan near one of north India’s biggest healthcare facilities, SKIMS, sends out a stench that engulfs most of the city’s downtown and its outskirts – tearing literally to smithereens the Mughal emperor Jehangir’s couplet on Kashmir describing it as a ‘paradise’ on Earth.
“Agar firdous baroye zameen ast, hami asto, hami asto hami ast (If there is paradise on Earth, It is here, it is here, it is here),” Jehangir said when he visited Kashmir in the 17th century.
Once a flourishing ecosystem and home to tens of hundreds of birds, Achan is close to the second largest lake in Kashmir – the Anchar Lake and the non-existent Khushal Sar. Massive encroachments around the lake prompted the government to officially pronounce it as a dead lake years ago.
In 1983, the then governor Jagmohan Malhotra, known by the mononym Jagmohan, decided to landfill the area to pave way for the construction of a satellite colony. The proposal, however, did not see the light of day and the place gradually turned into a stinking hell.
A contingent of J&K Police and Srinagar Municipal Corporation (SMC) employees guards the site round-the-clock with strict instructions for anyone entering the premises. Inside, the garbage simmers in gigantic mounds, crumbling in heat and rain, and flowing into the nearby agricultural land and into the Anchar Lake.
In September 2013, minister for urban development and urban local bodies, Nawang Rigzin Jora had informed the legislative assembly that the dumping site at Achan has been ‘modernised’ and ‘developed into a scientific landfill site’ jointly by the consultants of Asian Development Bank and J&K Economic Reconstruction Agency, claiming there was no ‘adverse’ effect on the surrounding population or the environment.
Health hazard
Flu expert Dr Nissar-ul-Hassan, who works in the nearby SMHS Hospital, however, disagrees. “Burgeoning heaps of garbage provides an excellent breeding ground for many kinds of microbes which can pose a serious health hazard,” Dr Hassan told The Wire.
The hospital database, according to Dr Hassan, has shown a sharp surge in patients suffering from gastrointestinal problems, stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, typhoid, skin diseases and respiratory allergies over the past few years.
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“Methane emitted from the Achan dump yard is another serious health risk,” Dr Hassan said. “Methane displaces oxygen in the air and as less oxygen becomes available for breathing, nausea and vomiting, convulsions, coma and even death can occur.”
“We have planted pipes into the dump and the gas so emitted is allowed to burn,” said Riyaz Ahmad, one of those in charge at the dump yard. “Sometimes the gas continues to burn for days together.”
In 2016, a waste-to-energy plant was proposed at Achan but the government failed to start the project earning censure from the green tribunal which stated the “government was bound to protect public from a health hazard.”
“We see no reason why this project should not be taken to its logical end, particularly when the project proponent has assured the state government and technical committee to examine performance in terms of technology and protection of environment,” Kashmir Observer quoted a bench of NGT headed by Justice Swatanter Kumar in its September 8, 2017 report.
“People have started to suffer from different diseases because of this huge [amounts of] dumping and even the water body, which is stated to be at a distance of 250 metres, is getting polluted besides the groundwater. It is not only necessary, but it is the mandate of the law and time today that the waste-to-energy plant must come up at the site in accordance with the law and rules in force,” the NGT wrote in its report.
The tribunal had on December 12, 2017 ordered for the completion of the 5-MW plant within 18 months. It also warned of a likely fine of Rs 50,000 for each day of delay.
What went wrong
Inside the SMC headquarters at Karan Nagar, the humble-looking commissioner, Peerzada Hafiz-ul-llah Shah, candidly admitted what went wrong in installing a solid waste management system on scientific lines in the first place.
“The ERA, which had constructed cells for dumping the garbage, refused to renew the contract with the SMC and we had to reopen Cell No 2 as Cell No 3 had already overflowed its capacity,” said Shah. “The city would have otherwise been filled with mountains of garbage and the blame would’ve fallen on me, that a man from a village lacks the decision-making ability to run the city’s affairs.”
The commissioner, however, made no bones about telling the public to get used to the foul smell. “For the time being, the city will have to learn to endure the stench for some more time,” said Shah as he took out a tea bag from his cup, pressed it hard between his thumb and forefinger, squeezing it to the last drop.
Shah feels hard pressed for money to ‘meet’ the municipality requirements.
“The amount of money goes to the buying of dumpers and other equipment, the salary of daily wagers, regularisation of employees etc,” he said after The Wire showed him two documents wherein an amount of Rs 93 crores had been released by the Centre in 2014. “Even this much money is insufficient.”
When asked to give a yearly break-up of the funds received from the Centre since 2010, Shah advised getting in touch with the Solid Waste Management (SWM) officer, Nazir Ahmad Baba who, in turn, wanted the financial advisor to reply. “The information related to money spent on SWM can be had from FA/CAO,” Baba replied to a WhatsApp query before blocking this reporter.
“It will take time to dig into the records,” reply from the accounts department came.
On the waste-to-power project, the SMC chief said he has been waiting for the legal formalities to get completed. “A tripartite agreement between the state government, the private consortium and the power development corporation is just around the corner,” he said. “By the end of 2019 or in the beginning of 2020, Srinagar will have a waste-based power plant.”
There are some powerful voices that suggest otherwise: “Hundreds of meetings with the NGT officials, private parties and various departments have all along been futile,” a former SMC commissioner, requesting anonymity, told The Wire. “SMC’s solid waste management system is a mafia that only fills the kitty of one and all in the hierarchy.”
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Another ex-commissioner SMC, G.N Qasba, who is working with the New Delhi-based Integrated Research and Action for Development – an autonomous research institute whose mandate includes energy and power systems, climate change and environment and sustainable urban development – claimed he proposed to the NGT the waste-to-energy power project at Achan.
“NGT approached me during my tenure as commissioner. SMC and I put forth a proposal suggesting the only remedy to rid the city of the garbage scourge was to use it as a resource to generate power,” Qasba told The Wire. “I had recently come back from a World Bank-sponsored South Korean tour wherein I got the opportunity to study a 10 MW waste-to-energy power plant and I wanted the same to be replicated at Achan.”
A seemingly disappointed Dr Qasba said he had sent a Detailed Project Report (DPR) to the NGT but he got transferred in the ‘nick of time’ when the tenders for the project were reportedly set to be opened. “I’ve absolutely no idea what the authorities have been doing all these years when the project should have been operational by now.”
In the meantime, the helplessness expressed by the incumbent SMC commissioner to rid the city of the foul smell is costing the citizens dearly.
“The Achan dump has literally damaged our olfactory senses,” said Sajjad Haider, editor at Kashmir Observer who lives at a distance of five kilometres from the landfill site. “Flowers, spices, perfumes, fruits, vegetables – all seem [to be] smelling like garbage.”
Haider said his newspaper has relentlessly been writing about the degradation of the once pristine environment but the authorities seem completely unmoved. Just in front of our house, the famed Gil Sar is being landfilled and converted into a residential colony. “How could a beautiful water body be converted into a residential colony unless the authorities and the local police are hand-in-glove with the land mafia,” Haider wondered.
The SMC chief, Hafiz-ul-llah Shah, agrees: “Police and the LAWDA should have acted against the land mafia,” he said. “Unfortunately, water bodies don’t fall within the municipality jurisdiction, otherwise, whatever is happening with Khushal Sar is a clear violation of the stated regulations.”
Vice-chancellor Islamic University of Science and Technology, Mushtaq Ahmad Siddiqui, who headed the Immunology and Molecular Medicine Department at SKIMS, blames a lack of civic sense among the masses for the mess. “Politicians, bureaucrats, policy planners – however corrupt or insensitive towards the public issues they may be – are at the end of the day from amongst us only,” he said. “Unless every member of the society assumes a civic role, no theatrics or rhetoric can turn a city into a Venice.”
Siddiqui, who is an alumnus of Chiba University Tokyo, Japan and has taught in Germany as well, rounds it off as: “Rome was not built in a day”.
Farooq Shah is a Kashmir-based journalist.