Drowning In Debris

Construction and demolition waste is piling up across India. Regulations are in place, but recycling is yet to gain momentum.AVIKAL SOMVANSHI breaks down the cartouche of waste mismanagement

- Avikal Somvanshi

LOOK AROUND, and you are sure to find at least one construction site close by. Urban India is in a race to construct and has no qualms in bringing down healthy buildings to replace them with something taller, or uglier. The reason is quite natural: increasing population, rising land cost and easy access to finance. But development also results in the generation of massive construction and demolition (C&D) waste. And people are clueless about what to do with it.

“I have engaged a transporter to remove debris,” says Anil Kumar, supervisor of a redevelopment project at Kailash Colony in south Delhi. “I have no idea what the transporter will do with it. It’s not my concern,” he shrugs. The transporter refused to divulge where he would dump the waste. But it is an open secret that it will end up in the Aravallis at the Delhi-Faridabad border. Kumar, perhaps, does not know about the C&D Waste Management Rules, notified on March 29, 2016, which clearly make all the stakeholders responsible for waste disposal, be it a small-scale generator, the municipal body or the government. It makes debris recycling mandatory and illegalizes dumping waste outside the designated sites.

Recycling plants turn debris to usable sand and gravel. The Bureau of Indian Standards recognizes these as a good substitute to natural sand in the concrete mix. “Waste recycling is good business and incurs reasonable returns,” says Rajesh K, owner of Rock Crystal, a Bengaluru-based private C&D waste recycling facility. He managed to turn organized recycling into a profitable business without any government subsidy. This is unheard of in other waste recycling streams.