Kolkata: The Kolkata Municipal Corporation has stalled a biomining project to clear legacy waste from Dhapa due to poor quality of work and missing deadlines.
In 2019, a Gujarat-based company was entrusted to remove legacy waste from 60 acres in the Dhapa dumping ground in East Kolkata.
The deadline was June 2024, but when the deadline was crossed, only about 20 acres of waste were cleared. The pace and even the quality of the company’s work were not satisfactory.
The biomining work at Dhapa was aimed at clearing the waste. This would be followed by reclaiming a portion of the land where a new engineered landfill site is supposed to come up.
The delay in completing the biomining project has completely disrupted KMC’s plans. The corporation plans to hire another company to complete the remaining job and create an engineered landfill facility within a year.
Bengal’s only engineered landfill site is currently located in Baidyabati in Hooghly. The dumping ground at Dhapa or Howrah’s Belgachhia is an open dumping ground.
The engineered landfill facility has pipes installed to catch the methane gas generated from heaps of waste.
It also has several layers built on the ground to prevent the leachate from waste from percolating down and contaminating the underground water.
The open dumping grounds have no such preventive mechanisms. The biomining work at Dhapa was meant to clear waste and reclaim a portion of the land for the new engineered landfill site.
