New Delhi, Sep 30 (IANS): All legacy dumpsites containing 16 crore metric tonnes of waste, and taking up 15,000 acres of prime land, will be remediated under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) 2.0.
Union Minister of Urban Affairs, Hardeep Singh Puri on Thursday said: "I am proud to note that Action Plans for over 1,000 legacy dumpsites -- including those in Delhi -- containing 12.8 crore metric tonnes waste have been approved by MoHUA, with total project cost of more than Rs 8,000 crore of which the Centre is contributing almost Rs 3,000 crore.
Speaking at an event 'Swachh Shehar Samvad' in Delhi, the Minister said: "India is now embarking on its next journey of Swachhata under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban) 2.0. We are now targeting to go from an ODF India to a 'Garbage-Free India'."
Some of the key initiatives under the mission include a renewed focus on source segregation, and scientific processing segregated fraction of waste at the ULB level.
Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) are being set up in every city to ensure that the segregated dry waste, including plastic waste fractions, are further sorted and processed or recycled.
More than 2,000 MRFs with design capacity of 42,000 tonnes per day are already operational across 1,400 cities.
The Minister said that setting up of processing facilities for Construction & Demolition (C&D) waste is being fast-tracked with a proposal to enhance processing capacity to 15,000 tonnes per day of C&D waste, to cover all cities under the National Clean Air Programme.
It also includes setting up waste-to-compost plants in every city for the processing of segregated wet waste.
The Minister said the Swachh Bharat Mission has been a tremendous success not just because hard infrastructure such as toilets was built but more importantly because ground-up capacity building and IEC (Information, Education, and Communication) efforts were prioritised.
Much like in the first phase of the mission, we are witnessing record-breaking participation from citizens, including especially young children and students, in SBM (U) 2.0, he said.
"I am glad that the Centre of Excellence at IIM Indore was launched today. I am certain that it will be yet another reinforcement of the capacity building efforts of the mission by harnessing insights from field-based learning in collaboration with the Indore Municipal Corporation, and focusing on research and innovation," added the Minister.