Fire at the garbage dumping chute of Darjeeling from Saturday night, at Amar Jyoti Gram about 4 km from town, has locals living around the area worried.
Following this a team of the Darjeeling Municipality headed by the civic body chairman Dipen Thakuri visited the area where he maintained that shifting of the dumping site was the only option.
Thakuri maintained that they were looking into the matter seriously and wanted to shift it to a different area. He said that they have also talked to state agencies regarding a project for the dumping area for which a DPR was already ready. He said that the project entailed shifting of the dumping site to another place below, near Chala Godown where a dumping ground would be made, and machines also installed for the segregation of waste.
Thakuri said that within a week an engineering team would arrive from Kolkata and do a study of the viability of the project.
Adding to that, the ward councillor of ward 17, Nitesh Gurung said that the fire started last night and the fire brigade had been called to douse the fire. He said that this was a repeated phenomenon that has been happening since the past while maintaining that methane gas formed below the trash was one of the reasons that fires started along with cigarette stubs being thrown there by rag pickers.
