Punjab's Contrarian Approach

Safe waste disposal is a big challenge for the national sanitation overdrive. Punjab has been experimenting with centralised systems to tackle this. Has it worked?

- Rashmi Verma

WHILE STATES in different ecological regions of the country are struggling to get suitable designs for systems to treat the solid and liquid wastes coming out of their toilets, Punjab has tried to tackle the problem in a different way. For over a decade, the state has been experimenting with both centralised and decentralised waste management systems to make access to sanitation tenable and safe. While the state’s 86 per cent households have access to toilets now, it inevitably emerges as the first port of call to check whether the challenge of safe waste disposal has been tackled effectively as envisioned.

The state government’s Department of Water Supply and Sanitation (DWSS) has been collaborating with the World Bank (WB) to set up a range of waste management systems to adequately meet the demand in face of fast increasing number of toilets. The centralised systems developed under this collaboration include conventional sewage treatment plants (stp), Waste Stabilisation Ponds (WSP) and Duckweed Ponds. The sewer connection to these treatment systems are conventional sewer and solid free sewer (also called small bore sewer) carrying the liquid waste under gravity. A district is allotted one of the above systems depending on local ecology and needs. For example in Muktsar district that has water logging problem, WSPs were suggested. “This is because enough land was available and it is a low cost-low energy system,” says Amrit Deep Singh, sub divisional officer, Public Health and Engineering Department, Muktsar. While districts like Ludhiana and Amritsar were suggested to set up stps because the socio-economic condition was favourable.