Most abattoirs across the country dispose of their waste in the most hazardous manner, pollute land, air and water and make lives of those living in their immediate vicinity miserable. Residents living in immediate environs of many slaughterhouses in the country often complain of blood trickling out of their taps.
State governments have tried out various remedies such as effluent treatment plants ETP , rendering plants and relocating slaughterhouses. But nothing has worked. Why is the problem so unmanageable? According to a report published by the New Delhi-based non-governmental organisation NGO , Vatavaran in -- A peep into legal and illegal slaughterhouses -- as against 3, legal slaughterhouses in the country there are 32, illegal ones.
And these are conservative figures. Worse still, none checks the quality of meat coming out of these slaughterhouses. The company claims to be using biomethanation to treat waste and utilise energy. But this company is a rare exception. Filthy Idgah Unhygienic conditions abound around Idgah -- Delhi's principal slaughterhouse.
It is spread over seven acres in the Sadar Bazaar area of the city and around sheep, goats and buffaloes are slaughtered here everyday. The slaughterhouse gets its livestock from a nearby animal farm. The animals are supposed to undergo a thorough health check up before being slaughtered. Only stamped meat can be sold in the market," informs the manager of Idgah. Health check ups include checking the animals' general appearance, heart rate, temperature and respiration. The animals are also tested for viral such as rabies , bacterial such as anthrax and paraxial such as red water diseases.
But admits a local vet, these check ups are cursory. He also complains that Idgah does not have a laboratory to conduct proper testing. Idgah generates waste amounting to tonnes per day TPD. And it has no effluent treatment plant ETP to treat this waste. The Vatavaran study found that as against the permissible slaughtering limit of 2, animals, around animals were butchered in Idgah everyday.
The study also showed that there were 15, illegal slaughterhouses in Delhi, most of them in the vicinity of the legal one. The waste from these dens of unhygiene is not accounted for and get disposed in nearby by lanes and low lying areas, choking sewer lines and spreading infection.
Since then many directions have been issued, including shutting down of the slaughterhouse or its relocation to Loni in North Delhi, but nothing much has been achieved so far. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi MCD which owns the Idgah slaughterhouse, has ambitious plans to modernise and mechanise this year old unit and equip it with an ETP and a rendering plant to make animal feed from waste. Also the livestock market, next to the Idgah, would be shifted to Ghazipur, where another rendering plant of 15 TPD capacity is expected to come up.
MCD officials are however completely at sea about this project; different officials have different versions of the plan. Moreover, there are grave doubts on MCD's capacity to modernise Idgah.
It is scheduled to be completed by September But MCD officials admit that there is no way they can keep with the schedule. Where is the sanctity of court, when in spite of its strict orders, more than 2, animals slaughtered daily at Idgah? Aligarh's slaughterhouse woes A DTE correspondent recently visited Aligarh to check its kattighar slaughterhouse. And came back with a gory story. It has in fact contracted out the slaughterhouse located in Makdoomnagar to a private contractor, who has further sub-contracted it to three butchers and the NNA is not even aware of this!
But for small slaughterhouses, the report said, sophisticated and capital-intensive technologies are unviable due to low volume of wastes and non-availability of other infrastructure facilities. This would be financially and technically viable and should be acceptable for the small slaughter houses," it added. It stressed that proper solid waste management will improve sanitation in and around slaughterhouses and it is beneficial to the slaughter houses in the long run due to returns on account of recovery and use or sale of the secondary by-products.
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