Kerala villagers force closure of garbage yard

Thiruvananthapuram: For the past few years, it had been an irony that India’s first fully literate town, Kottayam had a raging controversy over unscientific dumping of the town’s wastes in its outskirts. This week, local people in the Vijayapuram village panchayat on the town’s fringes decided that enough was enough, and forcibly closed the waste dumping yard at Vadavathoor. The panchayat had long been demanding a permanent closure of the garbage dumping at Vadavathoor.

Local people are up in arms over what they call a callous attitude of the Kottayam municipality to their plight. They say the stink of the garbage mountain pervades the entire neighbourhood, their well waters have been contaminated and that they are also facing various contagious diseases owing to the filthy environment around.

The protests are being led by people’s representatives including the local village panchayat president Baiju Cherukottayil, and local bishop emeritus of the Church of South India, Sam Mathew. The protesting locals held a rally to the dumping yard this week and then locked the facility, hoping to stop any more dumping of garbage there by the municipal authorities.

The development has in turn led to piling up of wastes in different parts of Kottayam because garbage trucks can no longer carry them to Vadavathoor and dump them there. Municipal authorities, however, have claimed that the village panchayat should have shown more patience because the municipality had covered the wastes with tarpaulin sheets and was in the process of capping the wastes at the yard.

There is unlikely to be an early solution to the problem because Vadavathoor’s garbage problem is reflective of a state-wide dilemma for local self government bodies about waste management. In the capital city, a similar protest is on by the residents of Vilappilsala in the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram against dumping municipal wastes there.

Kottayam’s problems are a bit more embarrassing for another reason, though. The town had only recently been declared a mural city after mural painters from different parts of the country and from abroad painted walls across the town with attractive mural paintings. The garbage heaps are now threatening to sully that picture.