Nothing goes waste here, Vasant Vihar takes care
In what could be seen as a unique community initiative, residents of Vasant Vihar have taken it upon themselves to manage the waste generated by the colony. Instead of banking on the civic body to clear the garbage, the RWA has created a composting facility in its three-acre Shaheed Rajguru Park to turn the wet waste into manure.
South Corporation standing committee chairman and area councillor Radhey Shyam Sharma recently inaugurated the “Community Composting Station”. He was so impressed by it that he has decided to replicate the model in 6,400 parks under the corporation’s jurisdiction. A South Corporation spokesperson said, “We do have composting pits at various locations but now we are going to take this up on a pilot basis around 10 parks in each zone.” The park in Vasant Vihar is a zero-waste park that even composts dry leaves and twigs into leaf mould. The manure produced from the composting station is used for nurturing the plants in the park.
There are three rainwater harvesting units in the park anda fourth one is going to be set up soon. Plants like wood apple, aloe vera, shyam tulsi, giloy amrita, papaya and lemon grass are available in a small nursery within the park. RWA members are allowed to take five saplings free of cost. Most of these have medicinal value with anti-bacterial qualities.
Promila Vohra (85), who has been residing in Vasant Vihar since 1993, recalls how the space was being used as a dump yard till a few years ago. She claims to have pursued the
cause and made the residents take stock of the mess they were living in. “People would defecate in the open. The place used to stink. It took so many years to get the residents
together,” Vohra said.
Rajinder Maggu, vice-president of the RWA, said Vohra would sit in the park and catch hold of people. “She got us to contribute for the welfare of this park,” he said.
The park has five sheds demarcated for composting and each shed has five rows of wet waste. “At a given point, we can process around a tonne of segregated wet waste. We
cover it with grass and leaves after segregation, turn it around for aeration every 15 days and the manure is ready in 45 days,” Maggu explained. The leaf mould takes six months
and produces very fine manure, he added.
There are around 300 members in the RWA who contribute Rs 200 per month. Six workers are involved in the collection and segregation of garbage from each household. “The landfill sites in Delhi are overburdened and have been dumped with waste beyond capacity. If every RWA comes up with such facilities, we can reduce the burden on landfill
sites greatly,” said Sharma.