The federal capital, shifted from Karachi to Islamabad in 1960, is still struggling to have an effective and modern system of waste management on permanent basis.
The Capital Development Authority (CDA), set up around 51 years ago, could not develop a permanent site to dump the city’s garbage to comply with its slogan ‘Clean and Green Islamabad’.
Stink from heaps of garbage dumped in Sector I-14 and mismanaged trash-trolleys in various residential areas are enough to show how much concerned the civic body is about its drive for cleanliness.
Recently, the CDA had shifted the dumping site from H-10 to I-14 on temporary basis. Its residents stood up to resist the activity like inhabitants of the areas from where the landfill sites had to be removed. Residents of the area and passers-by are of the view that it has become more of a hotbed of diseases than dumping site and should be immediately removed from there. The allottees of the Sector I-14 mainly comprise the people who have been accommodated there against their land acquired by the CDA for development of different residential sectors. The residents said they had been requesting the CDA to start development activities in the sector but instead of development, it had started dumping the garbage. Earlier, the authority had planned to construct a landfill site in Kurri Village over 100 acres but the residents and environmentalists moved the court in 2006 for hazardous impacts on health. Having population of around 1.3 million, Islamabad generates almost 600 to 700 tons of garbage a day but the CDA Sanitation Directorate is apparently incapable to remove and dump the waste.
