Gurgaon: MCG, which has acted so far. Solid waste management 175 crore work on “risk and cost” of Eco Greensaid that the expenses incurred on this would be borne by the ex-concessionaire.
A significant portion of this expenditure – about Rs 166 crore, about 95% – was spent on processing legacy waste. Bandhwari Landfill site, a task that Ecogreen had to carry out in accordance with its contract with MCG.
The corporation now needs to recover the money it has spent from Eco Green.
It has recently prepared an estimate of the costs involved, and according to sources, it will be addressed in the ongoing legal mediation process between MCG and Ecogreen. “Risk and cost estimates will be recovered from Ecogreen through arbitration. The processing of legacy waste was included in the scope of work assigned to them. If Ecogreen disputes this fact, they can file their claim.” Evidence in support needs to be provided,” MCG Commissioner Narhari Singh Bangar told TOI on Monday.
The corporation tied up with Ecogreen in 2017. Between August 2017 and January 2024, MCG paid the firm a total of Rs 377.5 crore for solid waste management in Gurgaon and Faridabad, amounting to around Rs 3 crore per month. Ecogreen was being paid for door-to-door collection of garbage, transporting it to secondary waste collection points and then to the landfill site, among other tasks. The corporation terminated its contract with Ecogreen in June this year.
In July, Gurgaon MP Rao Inderjit Singh wrote to Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini saying that Ecogreen had been paid more than Rs 350 crore by the civic body despite its failure to fulfill its obligations.
According to MCG officials, as per the agreement, Eco Green was also to process waste at Bandhwadi. He said that the waste accumulated daily at the landfill since August 2017, when MCG and MCF hired Ecogreen for waste management in Gurgaon and Faridabad, was also added to the leggy West Mountain. was, which the firm should have acted upon.
Around 2200 tonnes of garbage is dumped in Bandhwari from Gurgaon and Faridabad every day.
However, the private company said that the processing of legacy waste does not come under their scope of work. “From the beginning, we have been saying that the MCG failed to comply with the concession agreement. We did not get the land as per the agreement to set up the transfer station and the waste-to-energy plant. Since our agreement is a public document, it clearly states “We have not got 90 acres of land as promised. Currently, the government is paying the new concessionaires separately to get rid of the legacy waste,” Ecogreen CEO Nagarjuna Reddy said. Can go and then establish a technology.
After MCG sent Ecogreen an early termination notice in December last year, Ecogreen submitted a remedial plan. The firm proposed in its reform plan that 150 of EcoGreen's 370 waste bins would be replaced with new vehicles and that it would purchase an additional fleet of 150 vehicles for door-to-door waste collection. For this, Ecogreen had said that it would spend Rs 22.7 crore.
The erstwhile concessionaire had planned to set up a transfer station along the Dwarka Expressway, provided the MCG provided them with designated land.
In its remediation plan, the concessionaire also proposed to set up a material recovery facility with a processing capacity of 300 tonnes per day. However, MCG said the concessionaire failed to implement the remediation plan it had proposed, after which the contract was cancelled. The development comes at a time when the city is facing a solid waste management crisis. On June 12, the state government announced the need for solid waste in Gurgaon under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, in view of the “dangerous” level of untreated waste in the city.
In an affidavit submitted to the NGT recently, the corporation reiterated its commitment to clear all old waste at Bandhwari by December 31. To achieve this goal, it plans to process 12.09 lakh MT, reaching a daily processing capacity of 10,990 tonnes. According to the affidavit, 2.5 lakh metric tonnes of solid waste is expected to be dumped from August 30 to December this year.