Meghalaya to produce electricity from garbage

SHILLONG, Dec 23 – The Meghalaya Government has embarked on a hi-tech waste management project to clean up its cities and turn garbage and wastes to productive use as a spin-off.

An Expression of Interest floated by the government recently for such a pilot project here has had as many as seven Indian and International companies participating. The list was later pruned to three. Shillong city has been selected to host the pilot project.

Urban Affairs Minister Ampareen Lyngdoh, who had visited the plant sites of two such hi-tech waste management plants in Pune, shortlisted by the government, said she intended to inspect the third site in Bangalore early next year.

“What impressed me and my officers the most is the fact that both the plants generate electricity using shredded plastic and other wastes. They also produce organic fertilisers. This could be implemented here on a PPP mode,” Lyngdoh said.

Apart from generating electricity, the plants would also create direct and indirect employment for the youth, she said.

In Pune, she said, at least 80 entrepreneurs had been employed in the project. Besides, rag-pickers have also been engaged in collecting wastes for the plants, the Minister said.

The Shillong Municipal Board has to deal with 170 metric tonnes of household wastes on a daily basis. At present, the dumping site at Marten in the city suffers from a lack of space. It caters to a population of 3,14,610 (2011 census) and has been in operation since the 1930s.

“With these amount of wastes,” Lyngdoh pointed out, “the proposed plant could produce about 16 MW of electricity and the plant runs on its own power.”

Explaining how the system works, Lyngdoh said, “The plant first segregates dry garbage from wet. The wet garbage is collected by the municipality and dumped in the manure bin while the rag-pickers collect the dry garbage. Fertiliser is made from the wet garbage.”

Dry garbage includes plastic bags, papers, cans and boxes and can be collected by rag-pickers and wet garbage includes vegetable wastes, fruits and flowers.

Wet garbage is decomposed using worms EM solutions and eventually converted to manure, she points out. “Interestingly, the whole process does not emit any toxic gas into the atmosphere,” she said.

“Once the government makes up its mind to select one among the three companies, a proposal will be sent to the Government of India for funding,” Lyngdoh explained.

The project cost is estimated at around Rs 70-100 crore and it takes 12-15 months to install machinery, she said.

11 drown in Meghalaya

Shillong : Eleven coal miners were drowned and five others critically injured when a truck in which they were travelling fell into a river in Meghalaya, police said Thursday.
The incident took place Wednesday evening when the truck rammed into the railing of the 140-metre Jadukata bridge across the Ranikor river in West Khasi Hills district, near the Bangladesh border.
The miners were on their way home to spend Christmas with their families.
The dead included the truck driver, Muthu Ramachandran, the police chief of West Khasi Hills, told IANS.

Khasi orange threatened by imported saplings

Shillong, Dec 22 : The identity of Meghalaya’s Khasi Mandarin, also locally known as Sohniamtra Khasi, is under threat due to the import of orange saplings from outside the state.

Khasi Mandarin, a variety of orange from Wahkhen village and the famous orange grown in remote Mawphu and Nongsteng villages under Sohra in East Khasi Hill district, was few years ago certified by the Union Ministry of Horticulture as the best in India and is considered to be even better than the Nagpur orange.

Orange grown in the southern belt of Khasi Hills such as Mawphu, Nongsteng are of good quality and because of that they are juicy, sweet and tasty.

'' We came to know that orange growers in Meghalaya, mostly those from Ri-Bhoi district have been buying orange saplings from outside the state without realising the danger posed by such saplings to the identity of our own variety,'' horticulture director Dr C O Rangad told reporters today on the sidelines of the Orange Festival held at Sohra.

Dr Rangad said, the orange growers were tempted to buy saplings from other places outside Meghalaya because of lesser price compared to good quality saplings being supplied by the state's horticulture department.

'' The price of one sapling from outside is between Re 1 and Rs 3.But the price of sapling grown in Meghalaya costs Rs 7.50p. This is a worrying trend and our farmers should realise that the mixture of saplings from within the state and outside is a major threat to the identity of our own variety being posed by such cheap saplings that they get from outside,'' Dr Rangad said.

He also said that the famous Khasi Mandarin and other variety of oranges being grown in various parts of the state are under attack by pests.

The 13th Finance Commission has recently awarded Rs 30 crore to Meghalaya for setting up of two planting material hubs for different types of horticultural saplings including orange - one in East Khasi Hills and another in East Garo Hills district.

''Out of 30 crore, Rs 5 crore will be utilised for orange saplings since the government want to encourage orange growers in the state to buy saplings from outside,'' Dr Rangad informed.

However, orange growers from Mawphu, the village in Sohra area widely known for producing the best variety of orange known as Khasi Mandarin said, they have never imported cheap saplings available from outside the state for planting in their orchards.

Despite the potential in orange production, the village is yet to be connected with road and the orange growers have to physically carry tonnes of orange on foot to bring to Sohra market.

sciSCREEN thanks and Merry Xmas

Dear All,
Just a quick message of thanks to all those who have supported sciSCREEN this year: funders, organisers, speakers and those who have attended. This year we have run 7 full sciSCREENS from the King's Speech back in January, Never Let Me Go in March, Black Swan in April, Poetry in July, Silent Running and We Need to Talk About Kevin in November and Take Shelter in December. In addition, we have also organsied 3 sciSCREEN lights: Into Eternity in May, Page One in September and Strigoi in October. I hope you have all enjoyed and we will be in touch in the new year with a new film and a new system.

Kind Regards and Merry Xmas
Jamie

Kinabalu Biocultural Law Project

On the 20th of December, Natural Justice and Borneo Conservancy entered into a Memorandum of Understanding relating to the Kinabalu Biocultural Law Project. The project will be undertaken in partnership with the Sabah Biodiversity Centre and will explore with a number of Dusun communities living around Kinabalu Park (Sabah, Malaysia) innovative ways of engaging with laws towards protecting their biological and cultural diversity. The project will build on the work undertaken by partners to the Projek Etnobotani Kinabalu (Kinabalu Ethnobotany Project) and a recent study on traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous peoples' and community conserved areas (some outputs of which are available online). The project will also benefit from input from Dr. Agnes Lee Agama (South East Asia Coordinator of the Global Diversity Foundation) acting in her personal capacity. Natural Justice looks forward to working with the communities and team on the project.

L-R in the photo: Dorothy Lim, Lanash Thanda, Alice Mathew, and Daniel Doughty (Borneo Conservancy); Holly Shrumm and Harry Jonas (Natural Justice).

Meghalaya assembly to quiz cop for booking MLA

A traffic constable in Shillong will have to answer before the Meghalaya assembly for the "offence" of booking an MLA who had allegedly violated road rules.

Earlier this month, traffic police constable S Thapa booked legislator Ronnie V Lyngdoh, a Congress member, for allegedly
parking his car in a no-parking zone in Meghalaya capital Shillong. Thapa and his superior have now been asked to appear before an assembly panel for an explanation.

Lyngdoh had told the traffic policeman who he was, but the latter said he had no option but to go by the law.

On Friday, Thapa and his superior, inspector Cherry Shadap, received notice from the Committee of Privileges and Ethics of the Meghalaya legislative assembly. Lyngdoh heads this panel.

The notice directed Thapa and Shadap to appear before the panel on Tuesday on charges of breach of a legislator's privileges.

"The summoning is not to take punitive action or to get even with them," Lyngdoh told HT from Shillong. "The idea is to have a discussion with them to eliminate high-handedness. I was driving the car, and had sought 10 minutes for my wife to see her doctor. It was difficult for her to walk in an area where the no-parking zone was endless."

According to Lyngdoh, the traffic police should also have been equally strict with temporary stalls selling Christmas wares on pavements, causing inconvenience to pedestrians.

Senior police officials declined to comment, but social organisations have criticised Lyngdoh. "No one is above the law, and a legislator in particular should lead by example," said Agnes Kharshiing of Civil Society Women's Organisation.

The house panel's notice had coincided with another traffic policeman slapping a fine of Rs1,000 on Meghalaya rural development minister Saleng A Sangma for parking his SUV with a red beacon at an unauthorised place.

New Report: Land Rights and the Rush for Land

The International Land Coalition (ILC), International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), and Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) have released a new report entitled, "Land Rights and the Rush for Land: Findings of the Global Commercial Pressures on Land Research Project". Authored by Ward Anseeuw, Liz Alden Wily, Lorenzo Cotula, and Michael Taylor, the report is the culmination of a three-year research project that brought together 40 ILC members and partners to examine the characteristics, drivers, impacts, and trends of rapidly increasing commercial pressures on land.

According to the online synopsis, the report "strongly urges models of investment that do not involve large-scale land acquisitions, but rather work together with local land users, respecting their land rights and the ability of small-scale farmers themselves to play a key role in investing to meet the food and resource demands of the future. The conclusions of the report are based on case studies that provide indicative evidence of local and national realities, and on the ongoing global monitoring of large-scale land deals for which data are subject to a continuous process of verification." Although research and monitoring will continue, the report draws some conclusions and policy implications from the evidence already gathered.

The full report and executive summaries in English, French, and Spanish are available online.