HYGIENE IN HIDING: The scene outside the Tangra slaughterhouse. A Telegraph picture

The 146-year-old civic slaughterhouse in Tangra, east Calcutta, is finally set for a revamp.

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation, in association with a private agency, has finalised a Rs 2-crore scheme to renovate the city’s first centralised abattoir.

The funds will be borne by the civic body itself.

Before the abattoir was set up, animals used to be slaughtered in the open in unhygienic conditions across the city.

The slaughterhouse, however, now wallows in neglect, its unhygienic ambience revealed in a survey report prepared by the Australian consultant Aegis in 1998.

“The revamp scheme has been drawn up keeping in mind three objectives — to supply meat and beef prepared in hygienic conditions to the shops, to restore its architecture and and to ensure the waste produced in the abattoir does not pollute the environment,” municipal commissioner Alapan Bandyopadhyay said on Wednesday.

The project will be executed jointly by three civic departments — health, project and development, and solid waste management — and a private agency, GK Sen & Associates.

While the health department will be responsible for fixing the hygiene problem, the project and development wing will restore the architecture of the structure.

The solid waste management department, in collaboration with the private party, will set up an effluent treatment plant on the slaughterhouse campus and a waste recycling unit in Dhapa.

Civic chief engineer (conservancy) Arun Sarkar said post-revamp, waste water from the slaughterhouse will not flow to the drain directly. “It will be treated in an effluent plant to bring down its biological oxygen demand (BOD) level to the permissible limit.”

The private party will set up a waste recycling unit in Dhapa, for which an 1.5-acre plot has been identified. The bowels of the slaughtered animals will be converted into manure in the unit.

The letter of intent will be issued to the private party next week.

The revamp plan was Initially considered under the Asian Development Bank-funded Calcutta Environment Improvement Project. But for some unstated reasons, the issue was dropped then.

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation had given an undertaking to the Supreme Court to curb pollution caused by the abattoir by 2007.