Huge swathes of areas in Action Area II of New Town are turning into wasteland because of dumping of piling waste by construction companies. And the matter has taken such a serious turn that a housing complex that is seriously impacted is already considering legal recourse.
The problem, a recurrent one in New Town over the years, is now acute in Action Area IID, which is seeing a flurry of construction. Several plots in the area around Greenwood Elements and behind Greenwood Ambition are covered with thick and smooth cake-like layers, which are in different stages of hardening at different places. Some have developed thin cracks as any freshly cemented floor would if left without adequate watering. The grass is buried underneath as is the base of all taller greenery, which has started withering.
Residents of the two complexes are up in arms, and with good reason. “This is environmental degradation. We have witnessed this happening ever since we arrived here two years ago. Earlier, the dumping used to happen on the east side of our complex, then to the north. Now it happens to the south of us. We had lodged a complaint with the NKDA a year and half ago. They sent a team but nothing happened. Rather, lately the dumping has increased manifold,” said Debabrata Bhaumik, president of Greenfield Ambition Apartment Owners Association.
Resents of Greenwood Elements speak to a labourer dumping slurry in a field beside the housing complex in the course of a protest on Tuesday
“On a couple of occasions, stray animals have entered the dumping sites, got stuck in the slurry and died there, with their carcass rotting for days,” said N.N. Saha, joint treasurer of the Greenwood Elements Apartment Owners Association, pointing to the barren dull white layer.
The residents are also worried about the future when the waste would dry up and float in the air as fine particulate matter. “We are living in an island surrounded by dumping sites. These harmful chemicals would harden. Dust from its top layer would pollute the air and cause us lung congestion,” added Arnab Bhowmik, president of Greenwood Elements.
A staff member points to the slurry seeping into the compound of Greenwood Elements from the adjacent dumping field through the base of its boundary wall
The housing complex has a more immediate concern. “The dumping activity has been going on for several months and with the adjacent field overflowing, this slurry is now seeping under our boundary wall and getting into our drains. This will soon harden and clog our drainage lines. Parallely, rainwater will not percolate in the open fields and flood our compound. Mosquitoes will breed in the pool that would form. Even the drainage outlets on Street 676, our approach road, which the NKDA had cleaned after the Pujas, are now clogged because of this. Unless the civic authorities clean them again before the monsoon, there will be no scope of stormwater drainage,” added vice-president Dhrubajyoti Basak. The L-shaped five-acre complex is impacted on both its south and west sides.
Fingers are being pointed at the construction site of Salarpuria Inspire/ Imagine project, barely 50m away from the dumping sites, as the tankers are seen to come out from and go back into that gated area, where piling of the project, comprising 13 residential towers and a clubhouse, is underway.
People power
On December 10, a team of representatives from Greenwood Elements met the NKDA authorities to lodge a complaint and on Tuesday, residents staged a protest at a dumping site and even apprehended a tanker, which was dumping waste. “The driver fled but we grabbed the keys of the vehicle and called the Eco Park police station. We had lodged a written complaint there about the situation earlier as well. When we called, the investigating officer for the case came and took the tanker away,” said N.N. Saha, treasurer of the Greenwood Elements Apartment Owners Association.
The tanker, it was learnt, was released from the police station within hours on payment, officially, of a fine of Rs 2,500.
On Wednesday, the association shot off a letter to SS Piles, a Fern Road-based company in south Calcutta, which is in charge of the piling work for the Salarpuria project, seeking immediate cessation of the dumping and compensation for the damage to the drainage system.
Three parked tankers dump slurry on empty plots on Monday
What we saw
On Monday afternoon, when The Telegraph Salt Lake visited the area, dumping of slurry was going on in full flow. As many as three tankers were parked next to the empty field next to Elements where little soil is visible anymore. Pipes were gurgling out the waste from each tanker, which on emptying its contents, was driving back to the construction site nearby for a refill.
On visiting the construction site, piling was seen to be carrying on at multiple spots, next to some of which the tankers were parked and getting filled. The site in-charge, who was present in the SS Piles site office, said they had started work in September and would continue till mid-February.
On being told about the illegality of dumping piling waste randomly, he argued that it was bentonite clay, which was safe for the soil.
The once-grassy surface looks transformed, buried in slurry
When The Telegraph Salt Lake asked him whether dumping large volumes of untreated drilling mud, along with drilling additives like polymers and heavy metals, would not contaminate the environment and stop water percolation, he claimed he was unaware where the containers were dumping the waste. “Ami toh beriye soja rastay bari jai,” was his response on being told that dumping was taking place barely 50m to the right of his site’s gate. Neither did he admit to notice how the full tankers came back empty so quickly even though that would prove that they did not leave the immediate neighbourhood for the dumping. “The responsibility of dumping has been given to the tanker owners,” he said, shirking responsibility.
The administration is passing off the source of the piling slurry to be “somewhere in Narayanpur next door”, which, it seemed, would absolve them. The assistant sub-inspector of Eco Park police station, who was handed the tanker caught by the residents, was at pains to assure The Telegraph Salt Lake that the tanker owner had promised not to pollute the area any more. He had no answer when asked whether the person who had come to claim the seized trunk from the thana had been interrogated about which firm the tanker was working for or which site it had picked up the waste from.
A senior NKDA official said the authorities had caught a few tankers in the past. “Our people had even deflated the tyres of those vehicles. If they are from our project area or even our planned area, it is easy for us to prosecute them. But my officers say they came from the Narayanpur side and do the dumping late at night,” he said. “If we get any proof of complicity of a construction firm in our planned area, we would immediately issue stop-work notice,” he said, promising to send a team to the Salarpuria site.
Residents said the tankers had stopped dumping activities since Tuesday when they caught one of them. And on Wednesday, the construction site, they noticed, looked unusually inactive. “Even if the officials come now, there is little chance of them catching the culprits red-handed as they are already on the alert,” Saha said.
Since the problem has plagued New Town for years, The Telegraph Salt Lake reached out to Debashis Sen, the former chairman of NKDA. Admitting that punitive measures for such illegal activities were enshrined in NKDA’s building rules, he recalled a case where the civic body had received a complaint of random dumping of piling waste. “Though we had no absolute proof about the source of the offence, all it took was investigating all the adjacent construction sites to check where piling was going on within the last couple of days. This circumstantial evidence was adequate to pin the blame on them and make them clean up the site, failing which we had threatened to issue a stop-work notice,” he recalled.
Piling waste being drained into an NKDA drainage canal flowing by the project site. The water colour changes from the dumping spot
An engineer formerly with the NKDA explained the role of bentonite slurry in the piling process. “A 70-100ft bore, which is drilled for a deep foundation, might cave in before a steel reinforcement cage can be lowered into the hole and concrete poured in it. To stabilise the walls of the bore, bentonite clay slurry, which has cementing power, is pumped into it as drilling progresses. Once the bore is thus stabilised, concrete is poured, displacing the slurry,” he said.
It is illegal to dump the slurry randomly on the land. “The percolation capacity of soil is lost. When it rains, the water is supposed to seep in and reach the groundwater level. But bentonite clay, being a sticky material, clogs the natural pores in the soil and stops rain from percolating.”
Piling in progress at the Salarpuria project site as a tanker loads bentonite clay slurry for disposal
He recalled some builders piping in the slurry inside manholes. “That would settle there and harden, reducing the diameter of the pipe and in turn, its drainage capacity.”
He suggested draining the bentonite slurry in wide and flowing canals, like Kestopur or Bagjola. “Even dumping them in the NKDA’s artificial canals (like the one present next to the Salarpuria project) is not right as they do not have adequate water flow to prevent the deposit from settling at one spot and hardening. But some unscrupulous contractors do such things to save transportation cost,” he said.
Write to saltlake@abp.in