Bhubaneswar, June 14: The municipal corporationhas got a month's time to come up with an alternative site for the relocation of the controversial Bhuasuni dumping yard at Daruthenga village on the outskirts of the city.

At a high-level meeting held yesterday, the villagers of Daruthenga, who had taken a confrontationist stand on the issue earlier this month, agreed to allow the municipal corporation to dump garbage at the site for a month.

The meeting, which lasted two hours, was attended by culture and tourism minister Ashok Chandra Panda, MLA Priyadarshi Mishra and Bijay Kumar Mohanty, Khurda collector Niranjan Sahu, mayor Ananta Narayan Jena, municipal commissioner Krishan Kumar and deputy commissioner of police Satyabrata Bhoi.

The solution was arrived at after the meeting with the villagers.

Sources said another meeting with the villagers would be held within a month and would be chaired by chief secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi, among other top officials of the state government. The second meeting will be held to arrive at a permanent solution for the issue.

"We had a brief talk with the villagers and assured them that we would come up with a permanent solution. Although dumping of waste will continue at Bhuasuni for the next one month, work on the waste-to-energy plant will not be carried out during the period. In the next meeting, we will come up with a solution in tune with the law," said an official after the meeting.

The agitation by villagers at the Bhuasuni dumping yard made disposal of waste in different parts of the city difficult with municipal corporation authorities unable to lift garbage in the absence of a site for disposal of waste. Moreover, the area behind Sainik School, which is used as the lifting point of garbage, had garbage piled up high and overflowing.

"The civic body officials are carrying out sweeping every day but for the past few days they haven't lifted the garbage from our area. This has created unhygienic conditions in the area," said Surasmita Thakur, a homemaker who lives in Niladri Vihar.

Local residents in VSS Nagar have echoed the same sentiments.

"The dumping ground at Sainik School was already creating an unhygienic environment for all. However, over the past few days, the situation has worsened as garbage is continuously piling up here and the civic body is not lifting it. They should do something about this as soon as possible," said Pritam Jena, a resident.