KMC Has No Alternative To Overburdened Dhapa

By S. P. Gon Chaudhuri

Garbage is gold. That's what the tonnes of waste that gets generated in Kolkata can actually be turned into. The city generates a whopping 4,000 tonnes of municipal waste, which is now being dumped at Dhapa. The present site is overburdened and KMC isn't ready with an alternative. But when the civic body does decide to switch to another place, it has to be a paradigm shift in the way it views and handles waste. Simply dumping the entire garbage is neither environment-friendly, nor commercially sound.
Had a little more attention been paid to the issue, Kolkata could have gone in for landfill engineering, where garbage is disposed scientifically in a way that prevents soil and ground water contamination and enables generation of electricity through methane extraction. But given the sheer quantity of garbage generated in Kolkata, it isn't possible to adopt landfill engineering, as it requires a large tract of land, which one cannot locate near the city.
Moving away will not serve the purpose, as transportation cost of garbage will go up, and so will pollution. The way forward for Kolkata is to go in for refuse derived fuel (RDF) technology, where waste is segregated into biodegradable and non-degradable segments. The biodegradable portion can be dried to form cakes for use as fuel in boilers that generate electricity. Some of it can also be used in making bricks. There is also plasma technology,
which entails combustion of biodegradable waste at very high temperature, so that there is no pollution. Given the amount of pollution in Kolkata, the city can seriously look at this technology that has been adopted in all major cities in the world, including Washington DC, Shanghai and Tokyo.
Of the 4,000 tonnes of waste generated in Kolkata, at least 40% should be biodegradable. If properly utilized, I believe it is possible to generate 40 MW of electricity from the refuse. The non-degradable portion can be sorted to recycle ferrous and non-ferrous metals. The rejects can be processed into compost or mixed with stones to go in for brick-making.
One can convert the mounds of rubbish into hillocks that develop into destination points like Swabhumi and PC Chandra Gardens have come up on rubbish heaps.

(The author is managing director, West Bengal Green Energy Development Corporation)

Poor Could Gain From Financial Crisis :

By Muhammad Yunus

San Jose, California, USA, 14 November : The global financial crisis can become an opportunity to help the world's worst off, says the Nobel Peace Prize laureate known as the "banker to the poor."
World leaders could encourage new types of lending that would let the poor take themselves out of poverty without the risks of the traditional system that has just failed, said Professor Muhammad Yunus. Yunus was awarded the Nobel in 2006 along with "microcredit" & "bangladesh Grameen Bank", which he founded in his native Bangladesh in 1983.
The bank has lent more than $7 billion, in tiny increments of a few dollars to a few thousand at a time, to millions of poor borrowers -- almost all women -- to run small businesses. Seamstresses would be lent money to buy a sewing machine or cloth, for example.
"This is the disaster of a lifetime, and disasters are very painful, but it's also an opportunity," Yunus said in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday. "There's lots of thing you don't do in a normal period, you keep on piling up problems. Now you can address it fundamentally."
The crisis, he said, was created by a handful of people driven by "extreme greed," but "it's the poor people, the bottom half, 3 billion people, who'll be hit the hardest through no fault of their own."
Although an eager capitalist, Yunus has long warned about the excesses of globalization and free markets unchecked by regulation. The recent meltdown of markets around the globe has only reinforced his belief that the world needs a regulatory structure, like a world central bank, to referee a financial system that is inextricably linked.
NEW STANDARDS
He also argued for new accounting and legal standards that would allow for a second separate industry, so-called "social businesses" such as Yunus' own Grameen Bank, to emerge.
Yunus said President-elect Barack Obama is in a unique position to "create his own history" and rebuild the financial system in such a way that an entirely new class of companies, driven by both profit motive and a desire to improve society, can be launched.
Yunus was in Silicon Valley to receive the James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award as part of the Tech Awards. The award's past recipients include Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates and Intel Corp co-founder Gordon Moore.
Grameen accepts no funds from outside donors, and finances all its loans from deposits. It does not require any collateral. Borrowers in groups of five self-regulate each other, ensuring repayment.
The bank claims a loan recovery rate of 98 percent.
The success of the bank has spurred similar efforts around the world, including Grameen America, which said its bank loans have just topped $1 million, with 380 borrowers getting loans of about $1,500 to $2,500.
The bank's U.S. push has been met with some skepticism that the Grameen model would work here. But the 68-year-old Yunus said the financial crisis has proved that social businesses like Grameen are actually more sound than traditional banks.
PARALLEL SYSTEM
"They say 'total reliance on collateral and lawyers and it is 100 percent foolproof, nothing can go wrong.' And built a whole system on that belief. And this disaster has proven everything wrong."
"At the same time a parallel system has been growing which is microcredit. No collateral, no lawyers. Even this huge big financial earthquake can't shake them."
When it comes to helping the poor, Yunus argues for entrepreneurism over charity or government assistance, believing it to be self-sustaining.
"If people lose jobs where do they go? Do they fall back on welfare? ... If lending money, $2,200 to a person, can create a job, self-employment, isn't it a better idea?"
Yunus believes technology has been crucial to the microcredit movement by effectively shrinking the globe.
He notes that the mobile phone is now everywhere, in even the world's poorest villages and envisions a time in the near future where the simple device is used to connect the poor to health care access, banking and other services.
"What other crazy things will happen, it's almost impossible to imagine right now in 15 years what this one little gadget can do."

(With Reuters)