Waste-to-power plants yet to take off

The proposal to generate power from waste continues to remain a non-starter with the successive state governments having miserably failed to take forward the initiative of converting waste into energy despite availability of large amount of municipal solid waste. Greater Hyderabad, which has a population of around 10 million, generates nearly 4,000 metric tonnes of garbage on a daily basis and over 100 MW of energy can be generated from half of the garbage. But due to indifferent attitude of the state governments, not even one MW of power could be generated from the waste since the last one decade. The project means a saving of nearly Rs.400 crore a year to the GHMC, the amount it spends on collection, transportation, dumping and disposing 4,000 tonnes of garbage generated daily.