Enormous piles of unsightly gypsum chunks, putrefying waste of flowers and offerings, and amorphous web of tangled steel rods were all that remained of the nine-day Ganesh festivities, covering banks of the Hussiansagar lake on Saturday.
Forty-eight hours after the designated immersion of the much venerated elephant god, more idols and tableaux kept arriving at the main immersion point of the city amid boisterous revelries.
Rag-pickers and urchins scoured through the garbage, looking for things that possessed scrap value. Some of them dived into the murky waters hoping for bigger spoils.
Large portion of the waste generated by Ganesh immersion fete has already reached the solid waste processing facility in Jawahar Nagar.
As per the scale kept at the entrance of the facility, where the trucks full of trash are weighed before they are let in, the waste arriving from across the city post Ganesh immersion accumulated to nearly 1,100 metric tonnes. This excludes the garbage generated by the Ganesh pandals through the 9-10 days and the revelries on the final day.
“We have deployed dedicated vehicles for collecting the remnants of idols and other scrap from all the immersion points, including immersion ponds and lakes, and carry them directly to the solid waste processing facility. A total 111 trips were made up to September 29, dumping 1,092 tonnes of waste at Jawahar Nagar,” informed a GHMC official.
GHMC has designated a total 33 lakes and 74 ponds for the immersion — of which 27 were permanent ponds, 24 were portable, and 23 were temporarily excavated and filled in.
GHMC’s Sanitation wing has deployed a total 223 Ganesh Action Teams, with the number of workers in each team ranging between seven and 42 in each shift. They worked round the clock to keep the roads on the procession routes and immersion points clean on the immersion days.
During the nine days of festivities, the daily garbage collection had soared to a highest of 9,600 metric tonnes on September 24. On an average, This included 800 to 900 MT from surrounding municipalities, which is also dumped at Jawahar Nagar. On an average, during eight days starting from September 21, the facility received 9,270 MT of garbage on each day, which is at least 400-500 tonnes more than the regular days.
