JNIMS turned into a dumping site : Fix responsibility !
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: April 21, 2025 -

Issue of bio-medical waste disposal not yet addressed properly :: Pix - TSE

This is unacceptable and responsibility should be fixed, pronto.

Two weeks after The Sangai Express published a news article in quick succession on April 4 and 5, came the news that the question of disposing bio-medical wastes at JNIMS has not been addressed to satisfactorily.

Fifteen days after the report was published came the news that toxic material continue to be buried in freshly dug pits.

Cocking a snook at what public health is all about and this is certainly unacceptable, especially in this age when priority is given to protecting the environment, which in turn means placing a premium on the health of people and animals.

Defeating the understanding of proper disposal of bio-medical wastes, endangering the land, the water that one drinks and the very air that one breathes.

Has Raj Bhavan taken note of what is happening at the southern side of JNIMS campus ?

Or has it not been brought to the notice of the Governor, the Chief Secretary, the Health Commissioner and others who matter, the highly placed folks who move around in their beacon fitted vehicles, complete with security escorts and expecting the lesser mortals to give them the right of way when they zoom around the roads of Imphal ?

Corrective action is what is expected and it doesn’t need expertise to understand the harm that may be caused to the people and the environment just because the folks calling the shots at JNIMS do not seem to care.

Far from removing the wastes, including toxic wastes, what has been done is to press some JCB into service, dig up pits and the put the wastes into the pits and cover them up.

Will this be acceptable in any other parts of the country ?

Manipur cannot accept this and responsibility should be fixed.

The first reports were published on April 4 and 5, and the latest, that is the failure to remove the wastes and instead burying them, was published on April 19 in the April 20 edition.

If this does not warrant fitting action from the side of the Government then one wonders what will prompt the authority concerned to crack the whip and take suitable action.

One should not forget that JNIMS has an incinerator to dispose all wastes and it beats human reasoning to even think that a portion of the JNIMS campus has been turned into a big dumping ground, with the wastes packed in plastics.

That this has come at a time when the State Government has taken it upon itself to ban all single use plastics and one is left wondering whether Manipur has been turned into a place where one can do as one pleases.

This is what appears to be happening at JNIMS and this is unacceptable.

JNIMS does follow the colour coding approach to segregate the general wastes from bio-medical wastes and if one goes back to the April 4 and 5 reports of The Sangai Express plastics of different colours containing the wastes generated from the hospital could be seen.

This should more than testify that the wastes dumped at the southern side of the campus, just near the Central Dairy Plant, a milk processing unit, are not all general wastes.

The reality is deeply alarming for here is a case of a place, which is there to take care of the medical needs of the people caring two hoots about the overall being of the people and the environment.

Manipur needs to wake up to the reality. This time it is JNIMS, but what about other Government Departments which are there to work for the welfare of the people ?

At the moment Manipur is under President’s Rule, an arrangement which has already completed two months and one hopes that something meaningful can be done at this stage when the scope for influence of any sort is seen to have minimised satisfactorily.

Crack the whip and do something concrete which should be visible to the public. In openly dumping all hospital wastes so nonchalantly, JNIMS gave out the clear message that it does not care about the well being of the people and the place and this is what is hard to digest.

From April 4 and 5 to April 20, in as much as there is nothing to suggest that JNIMS has taken up any corrective measures, it also stands that Raj Bhavan seems to have looked the other way.

This is unacceptable.