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By:

Quaid Najmi

4 January 2025 at 3:26:24 pm

Commercial LPG 'evaporates' in Maharashtra

Mumbai : The short supply of commercial LPG cylinders turned ‘grim’ on Wednesday as hundreds of small and medium eateries – on whom the ordinary working Mumbaikars depend on for daily meals – shut down or drastically trimmed menus, on Wednesday.   With an estimated 50,000-plus hotels, restaurants and small food joints, the crunch is beginning to be felt severely, said Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Association of India (FHRAI) vice-president and Hotel and Restaurant Association Western...

Commercial LPG 'evaporates' in Maharashtra

Mumbai : The short supply of commercial LPG cylinders turned ‘grim’ on Wednesday as hundreds of small and medium eateries – on whom the ordinary working Mumbaikars depend on for daily meals – shut down or drastically trimmed menus, on Wednesday.   With an estimated 50,000-plus hotels, restaurants and small food joints, the crunch is beginning to be felt severely, said Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Association of India (FHRAI) vice-president and Hotel and Restaurant Association Western India (HRAWI) spokesperson Pradeep Shetty.   “We are in continuous touch with the concerned authorities, but the situation is very gloomy. There is no response from the Centre or the Ministry of Petroleum on when the situation will ease. We fear that more than 50 pc of all eateries in Mumbai will soon down the shutters. The same will apply to the rest of the state and many other parts of India,” Shetty told  ‘ The Perfect Voice’ .   The shortage of commercial LPG has badly affected multiple sectors, including the hospitality and food industries, mass private or commercial kitchens and even the laundry businesses, industry players said.   At their wits' ends, many restaurateurs resorted to the reliable old iron ‘chulhas’ (stoves) fired by either coal or wood - the prices of which have also shot up and result in pollution - besides delaying the cooking.   Anticipating a larger crisis, even domestic LPG consumers besieged retail dealers in Mumbai, Pune, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Ratnagiri, Kolhapur, Akola, Nagpur to book their second cylinder, with snaky queues in many cities. The stark reality of the 12-days old Gulf war with the disturbed supplies has hit the people and industries in the food supply chains that feed crores daily.   “The ordinary folks leave home in the morning after breakfast, then they rely on the others in the food chain for their lunch or dinner. Many street retailers have also shut down temporarily,” said Shetty.   Dry Snacks A quick survey of some suburban ‘khau gullies’ today revealed that the available items were mostly cold sandwiches, fruit or vegetable salads, cold desserts or ice-creams, cold beverages and packed snacks. Few offered the regular ‘piping hot’ foods that need elaborate cooking, or charging higher than normal menu rates, and even the app-based food delivery system was impacted.   Many people were seen gloomily munching on colorful packets of dry snacks like chips, chivda, sev, gathiya, samosas, etc. for lunch, the usually cheerful ‘chai ki dukaans’ suddenly disappeared from their corners, though soft drinks and tetrapaks were available.   Delay, Scarcity  Maharashtra LPG Dealers Association President Deepak Singh yesterday conceded to “some delays due to supply shortages” of commercial cylinders, but assured that there is no scarcity of domestic cylinders.   “We are adhering to the Centre’s guidelines for a 25 days booking period between 2 cylinders (domestic). The issue is with commercial cylinders but even those are available though less in numbers,” said Singh, adding that guidelines to prioritise educational institutions, hospitals, and defence, are being followed, but others are also getting their supplies.   Despite the assurances, Shetty said that the current status is extremely serious since the past week and the intermittent disruptions have escalated into a near-total halt in supplies in many regions since Monday.   Adding to the dismal picture is the likelihood of local hoteliers associations in different cities like Pune, Palghar, Nagpur, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, and more resorting to tough measures from Thursday, including temporary shutdown of their outlets, which have run out of gas stocks.

How do I manage my household Waste?

Updated: Oct 21, 2024

household Waste

The domestic waste, generally regarded as the Municipal Solid Waste, is generated at the household level through various human activities which havealready been discussed in the previous articles in this column.

Now, we will try to understand the impact of mismanagement of this waste on the environmental, social and economical and what should we do at the individual level and at the community level.

We generate ‘heterogeneous’ kind of waste at the domestic level as it is usually a mixture of wet waste and dry waste which is eventually disposed off only to get accumulated in the by-lanes and roadsides.

Let us assume that in a particular area or neighborhood of a city, there are about 20000 houses, each house generating approximately 2 kg of ‘mixed’ waste everyday amounting to total 40000 kg of waste.

Now this 40000 kgs of waste will be first dumped openly alongside of some road or by-lane in that neighborhood. It will be left there at least for a day or so till the local cleaning staff, appointed by the urban local body, arrives there at a stipulated time to fetch that load of garbage which will be dumped in a truck. That truck will then move to another such location where more or less same volume of garbage will have piled up. Finally, when that truck is filled to its capacity, it will travel some distance to reach its destination, that is a dumping yard.

A dumping yard is a piece of open land reserved for dumping the city garbage. Before moving ahead, let us visit a garbage heap amounting to 40000 kgs lying along the roadside.

Look there, can you see some animal activity there? Yes. There are crows, there are dogs, there are rats scurrying around and then there are house flies and other insects along with the humans labelled Rag Pickers. And oh my god!

We can see a few cows searching through that heap of garbage. What are the cows doing here? No wonder. People like you and me in the neighborhood have stored and packed their left over stale food and other eatables in a plastic bag which has ended up eventually into this garbage.

Poor cows get attracted towards such bags containing food very carelessly thrown by the people and in an attempt to consume the food inside that bag, they end up in swallowing the plastic bag itself. The cow gets terribly sick and eventually die most of the times as plastic is very much unnatural ‘food’ for her.

The irony here is that we consider cows as our Holy Mother and treat her with utmost respect in our culture. Killing a cow for beef is not acceptable to us. It is beyond our tolerance limits. If that is the case, then we should think a hundred times before exposing our Holy Mother to such heinous act of disposing the food waste packed in plastic bags!

(The writer is an environment specialist. Views personal.)

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