Study for Kulithalai City Sanitation Plan

Kulithalai Municipality in Karur District has made rapid strides in the field of solid waste management in the past 18 months. ExNora International, the facilitator, had helped to formulate plans for source segregation of waste, household collector of streamlined collection routes, development of compost yard lying idle for over 8 years into a model for different methods of composting, vermi composting, greening the landscape and so on.

The Town with a population of about 30,000, on the banks of the River Cauvery, also went ahead with a new scheme for buying plastic waste from its own sanitary staff. This incentive scheme was appreciated by the staff as also higher officials in the administration who suggested other local bodies could follow a similar practice.

The Town, however, had some problems with regard to drainage system, since most of the irrigation canals and storm water drainages had become carriers of sewerage. The Municipality had focused on this area and soon came initiatives which attracted the attention of the District Administration and State level officials of Urban Administration.

ExNoRa International with the support of Water Aid is preparing a City Sanitation Plan for nine local bodies in Tamil Nadu, forming City Sanitation Task Forces and providing sanitation awareness. Kulithalai Municipality is the first Municipality preparing CSP in the State. BORDA and the CDD Society, Bangalore supported the Kulithalai Municipality model for solid waste management in 2009. Kulithalai Municipality is maintaining these with its own funds from 2010. ExNoRa requested CDD Society to provide technical support to prepare the City Sanitation Plan (CSP). CDD agreed to prepare the sanitation situation analysis and demand supply gap analysis for Kulithalai Municipality with its own funds.

The mapping the Town using GIS platform was done by a team of five experts from CDD Society.

The team, headed by Mr. Andrews Jacob and Mr. Felix, was assisted by the ExNoRa experts, local staff, and students from Bishop Heber College in Trichy. Kulithalai Town maps were downloaded from Google. It was divided into 4 survey blocks and 148 building blocks. This building block was divided into several household blocks. The data collection was done in each household block using the household survey questionnaire. All community toilet locations were uploaded on to the GIS map. A detailed ground survey was completed in six days.

Consolidation of the data is in process. CDD will develop suitable concepts with various technological options which will be presented to the Municipal Council shortly.