Garbage woes get worse

With the festival season adding to the capital’s garbage woes, the largest trash dump in the city limits is raising a hellish stink again.

Much to the dismay of the people living nearby, the City Corporation has resumed the dumping of garbage on a roughly six-acre plot and its environs lying next to Chalai on the Attakulangara-Killipalam Bypass. Truck-loads of waste, mainly from the nearby Chalai market, are being consigned to this plot owned by the Thiruvananthapuram Development Authority (TRIDA) every day. But the narrow lanes encircling this land also are lined with bags of rotting chicken waste and even dung, conveniently chucked by passersby after dark.

 ‘’We had obtained a stay as far back as 1997 from the High Court on the Corporation using this area as a waste dumping yard. But who cares?’’ said Adv V K Ajith Kumar, whose house stands in the midst of the pervasive miasma, just a stone’s throw away from the TRIDA plot, which, incidentally, is open on all sides.

 ‘’We approached the High Court in 1997 because we could not live here due to the odour. Now the Court has asked the Corporation to open Vilappilsala, but the opposite has happened. Vilappilsala remains shut and this place is being destroyed instead,’’ said A K Vijayakumar, one of the three petitioners in the 1997 case.

 ‘’The Corporation shall see that the garbage is not dumped in the residential area,’’ reads the order issued by Justice K A Abdul Gafoor back then.

 TRIDA has been planning construction on the land for years, but the project has simply not lifted off the planning board. Bad times arrived for the local people with the Vilappilsala plant shutting down in December 2011.

 The Corporation, scrambling to find alternatives, soon filled the area with garbage. Things got out of hand so quickly that TRIDA even wrote to the Corporation to stop dumping trash here. But now, it’s back to square one for the people. The unresolved dilemma of Vilappilsala, the festival season, and most of all, the Corporation’s inability to find a reasonable solution to garbage disposal are making life hell for them once again.