Walk past any roadside coconut-water stall in Jammu after a hot afternoon and you'll see the problem: a pile of split shells, usually swept straight into the nearest drain. Multiply that by every stall in the city and you get a recurring monsoon headache — clogged storm drains and waterlogged roads that slow down the morning commute to college or work.
The Jammu Municipal Corporation is now trying to fix that at the source. On Saturday, JMC Commissioner Devansh Yadav inaugurated a coconut shell shredding unit at Bhagwati Nagar, designed to convert discarded shells into cocopeat — a coir-based growing medium used in horticulture, landscaping and composting — instead of letting them pile up in the city's sewer network.
How the collection will work
Rather than relying on shells being dumped wherever a vendor happens to be, JMC is building a direct supply chain: coconut sellers across Jammu city will be issued special identification stickers so municipal collection vehicles can spot registered vendors and pick up their discarded shells on a regular schedule. The shells are then transported to the Bhagwati Nagar unit, where they're scientifically processed into cocopeat rather than left to rot or wash into drains.
"[The unit will] prevent drain blockages and reduce waterlogging during the rainy season but also convert waste into a valuable resource," the Commissioner said at the launch.
Why it matters for the monsoon ahead
Coconut shells are a small but stubborn contributor to Jammu's drainage problems — dense, slow to decompose, and easy to miss until a downpour backs up an entire stretch of road. The initiative slots into JMC's broader push this monsoon season to keep the city's streets passable, alongside its AI-camera pothole-detection and rapid road-patching programme rolled out earlier this year. For a city where waterlogged roads routinely mean late arrivals at campus or the office, a functioning drain is as much an everyday convenience as it is a civic upgrade — and turning the waste into cocopeat means it doesn't just disappear, it gets reused.
Related: How JMC's AI cameras and cold-emulsion patching are racing the monsoon
Sources: The Tribune, Kashmir Vision
