NAVI MUMBAI The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) has taken serious note of the absence of an independent Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) for Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation’s (NMMC) 300-bed hospital in Vashi.
It has asked for the facility to be in place within six months or else the hospital will not get consent for functioning from the MPCB.
NMMC, however, said that it has the requisite infrastructure in place to treat the effluents from the hospital.
The directive came during MPCB’s Consent Appraisal Committee (CAC) meeting on September 29. NMMC’s application for combined consent and authorization for the 300-bed hospital built on a 1,91,134 sqm plot located in sector 10A of Vashi came up during the discussion.
After due deliberation, CAC decided to grant combined consent and authorization to the hospital subject to fulfilment of few conditions. It wants NMMC to provide, within six months, a full-fledge effluent treatment plant (ETP) or a STP for treatment of trade effluents from its general hospital in Vashi.
Reacting to MPCB conditions, Dr. Pramod Patil, NMMC’s medical officer of health (MOH) said, “As per new MPCB norms, all hospitals with over 50 beds should have a STP. Apart from the civic hospital at Vashi, we have two more such hospitals in Nerul and Airoli. All these hospitals are connected to our state-of-the-art STPs. Every node in the city is connected to STPs. This ensures that all sewage and effluent waste from the city is treated and then disposed in creek water.”
He further added, “We have also appointed an agency to handle bio-medical waste from the hospital. There is daily collection and barcoding to track the outgoing waste and its disposal.”
He concluded, “We are complying with the requisite norms.”