New Delhi: With one day left until the deadline, the state of Punjab has still not submitted the Rs 1,096 crore compensation amount to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), Additional Chief Secretary, Tejveer Singh said to ThePrint.
On 25 July, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) ordered the Punjab Chief Secretary to submit Rs 1,096 crore and a compliance report to the CPCB as compensation for failing to comply with the solid waste management and sewage management guidelines by 25 August, 2024.
“We have not yet submitted the amount. We need to check when we received the order, we have a month after that to respond,” Singh told ThePrint Friday, 23 August. He added that they also have not yet submitted the compliance report to the CPCB. Expressing ambiguity over the order date, Singh explained that the Chief Secretary’s office does plan on submitting the compensation amount, and will be in talks with the finance department about it.
This is not the first time the Punjab government has failed to comply with an NGT order regarding waste management compensation. In 2022, the state was asked to submit Rs 2,080 crore in a ‘ring-fenced account’ to comply with environment compensation rules, which it failed to do.
The order passed on 25 July this year by a three-judge board of the NGT’s principal bench was assessing the status of states’ compliance with the Solid Waste Management (SWM) Rules of 2016 and other environmental regulations. The major issues pointed out by the NGT on 25 July concerning Punjab were that the state had first failed to show “any notable progress” in processing its solid waste despite being asked to multiple times since 2018.
The final tally of legacy waste in the state was 53.87 lakh metric tonnes in May 2024, while untreated sewage was 314 megalitres per day. The NGT also pointed out how the Punjab Chief Secretary had failed to submit the earlier compensation amount of Rs 2,080 crore from 2022.
Taking into account the two main offenses, the panel of Justices Sudhir Agarwal, Arun Kumar Tyagi, and A. Senthil Vel decided to impose a compensation amount of Rs 1,096 crore on the state of Punjab. The NGT, taking a “very lenient view”, chose to arrive at the amount by charging the Punjab govt 1 paisa for each kg of legacy waste and 1 paisa per litre per day for untreated sewage over the past six months. The total amount came out to be a whopping Rs 1,096 crore.
Speaking to ThePrint about the order, Additional Attorney General of the Punjab government advocate Sandeep Bajaj said, “The government has received the NGT Order and is currently exploring its options regarding the Rs 1,096 crore compensation. As for the earlier submission of Rs 2,080 crore, the amount was set aside by the state government, and the ring-fenced account is currently being created,” he added.
History of Punjab’s waste management issues
The Solid Waste Management Rules were passed in 2016 to create a framework for local bodies, states, and the central government, as well as citizens to dispose of solid waste in an environmentally sound manner. The rules dictate everything—from how users should segregate waste, to how data from solid waste processing industries should be compiled, and even the composition of State Level Advisory Bodies to address solid waste management measures in their region.
However, The NGT on 25 July recounted a history of its encounters with the Punjab government over its solid waste management. Back in 2019, when the tribunal was meeting the chief secretaries of all states to assess the implementation of the 2016 rules, it found “huge violations and gaps” in the state’s waste management. According to the data submitted, in 2019, Punjab was generating around 4,498 tonnes of solid waste per day, and treating only 696 tonnes per day, while the rest went to landfills.
Again in 2020, the Tribunal took note of the fact that the Punjab government had not provided any information about how much legacy waste there was in its landfills and how much had been processed.
The deadline for clearing all the landfills was April 2021, but the state had failed to comply with it. The NGT announced a compensation scale that ranged from Rs 1-10 lakh for every local body in Punjab in case of future compliance failures. The case was closed, but only after warning the chief secretaries of all states and the Central Monitoring Committee to keep a close watch on the waste management situation.
In 2022 again the Punjab government was pulled up for its inaction when the NGT found that around 1,025 tonnes of waste per day and 700 megalitres of sewage per day was still not being processed. Given the seriousness of the issue, the NGT immediately ordered the Punjab government to pay Rs 2,080 crore in a ring-fenced account within two months.
“Though Tribunal computed environmental compensation, instead of directing it to be deposited as environmental compensation, Tribunal took a lenient view by allowing the amount to remain under the control of Chief Secretary by depositing the same in a ring-fenced account so that it may be utilised for remedial purposes,” read the order on 22 September, 2022.
Legacy waste management
All of the municipal solid waste (MSW) that has been collected and dumped in landfills and dumpsites across the country is commonly called legacy waste. India has a plan in place to remediate its legacy waste of 1,324 lakh tonnes by the year 2025-26, according to the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) 2.0.
The SBM guidelines define the processes to clear legacy landfills through separation of recyclables and soil, bio-mining solid waste, and capping additional waste addition. These processes take into account the composition of the landfill, the surrounding areas and the capacity of government bodies to carry environmentally sound methods of clearing these landfills and transforming them into green zones.
The SBM Urban Dashboard shows the progress made by each state in remediating its legacy waste.
While states like Gujarat and Mizoram are at the top with barely any legacy waste left to remediate, other states like Telangana, Jharkhand, Delhi and Karnataka are not faring so well with more than 80 percent of their legacy waste still not cleared. Delhi, for instance, has not been able to reclaim a single acre of its legacy dumpsite land since the beginning of the SBM 2.0.
Punjab, while not as bad as Telangana and Karnataka, still has over 53 percent of its legacy waste waiting to be remediated. According to the latest information from the SBM dashboard, out of the total 110 dumpsites in the state, 32 have been totally cleared and remediated while 77 more are undergoing the process. Out of the 543 acres of legacy wasteland, the state has been able to reclaim 120 acres.
Present day
On 25 July when the NGT took up the case again, it compared the data of waste in Punjab in 2022 to 2024, and found some glaring violations. The total waste processing decreased from 3,075 tonnes per day in 2022 to 2,040 tonnes per day in 2024. Similarly, in the data about sewage treatment plants, while the installed capacity of sewage treatment increased from 1,786 megalitres per day to 1,905 megalitres per day, there was no data about how much of this capacity was actually being utilised, giving no real insight into how much sewage is actually being treated daily.
In addition to this mismatch in information, the NGT noted that the Rs 2,080 crore asked to submit in a ring-fenced account in 2022 was also not done by the Punjab government. “Repeated opportunities have been given to State of Punjab to take steps for strict compliance of environmental laws, still substantial non-compliance is evident,” said the NGT while imposing a compensation amount of Rs 1,096 crore on the state government.
The money, to be submitted to the CPCB, is supposed to be utilised for compliance work in the state itself to better the sewage and solid waste treatment methods. Earlier in 2022, too, the NGT asked the state government to set aside Rs 2,080 crore in a ring-fenced account, i.e an account that resides with the state government but is separate from its other assets, so that the money can be used for compensatory environmental work in waste management itself.
As AAG Bajaj explained, the state government had, in fact, set aside the money requested in 2022, but not in one separate ring-fenced account as requested by the NGT. After the 25 July order, this order too is being followed by the state. Both Bajaj and Additional Chief Secretary Tejveer Singh, however, did not share the exact date by when the Punjab government was planning to submit the Rs 1,096 crore compensation amount to the CPCB.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
Also read: Gurugram can’t get its trash together. Rich people’s waste caught in mafia-like drama