India’s first e-waste dump faces eviction
K Raghu
DNa India
Friday, April 07, 2006 00:24 IST
BANGALORE: India's first scientific hazardous waste dump faces an eviction threat for a new township. A joint Indo-German hazardous waste management unit (HAWA), set up to treat and handle e-waste at Dobbespet, about 45 kms north of Bangalore, faces eviction just a year before it was to become operational.
Reason: it is too close to some temples and mutts. Karnataka's forest and environment minister C Chenigappa fears the waste dump would harm the sanctity of the religious places.
Interestingly, the minister, a close associate of Janata Dal (secular) supremo H D Deve Gowda, believes that the e-waste unit would turn out to be one that would handle municipal waste from the booming city.
"We will build a new satellite town in the 100 acres allocated for the waste dump," he said.
HAWA has been designed to treat and handle e-waste, besides hazardous chemicals and minerals by adopting advanced scientific methods. GTZ, Germany's environment protection wing, has given financial and technical assistance for the project and cleared the location for the new unit.
"If the government goes ahead with a new location, no one will take us seriously," an official in the state environment department told DNA. The official said about Rs 20 crores had been invested in plant and machinery for the unit.
After nearly six years of preliminary work, this scientific waste dump would have been ready to treat electronic waste from 2007. The delay would now violate a ruling in January by the Supreme Court's Monitoring Committee on Hazardous Waste that every state should have a scientific unit to dispose hazardous waste by June this year.
"It (shifting to a new site) would amount to violating the Apex court's direction," Karnataka State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) Member Secretary B Ramaiah said.
The pollution board had urged tech firms in Bangalore and Mysore to store the computer waste it generated within its premises and hand them over to the new waste treatment plant from next year.
