Down in the dumps

The stench is spreading. With Bengaluru’s civic authorities groping in the dark as the ‘garbage mess’ in the city assumes intractable proportions, a political blame game has begun and the commissioner has lost his job. But who really is responsible for the crisis?

For over a week now, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagar Palike (BBMP), the city’s metropolitan authority, has been facing the ugly consequences of an unprecedented failure of the city’s garbage disposal system. With landfills around the city suddenly out of bounds, garbage has piled up in different parts of Bengaluru. Trucks loaded with stinking garbage are lined up along the roads. Pedestrians are the worst hit as they struggle to weave their way around the expanding dumps.

The crisis has been triggered by an agitation by villagers residing in the proximity of the city’s garbage dumping units. It began in Mavallipura, where residents rose up in protest against the dumping of garbage without any segregation mechanism, which has resulted in the spread of vector-borne diseases in the vicinity.

Residents of two other landfill sites – Manduru and Terra Firma – followed suit and demanded a complete halt to the dumping of the city’s waste in their backyards. People of other suburban villages around Bengaluru such as Gundur, Bommenahalli and Kadgollahalli have also stopped garbage dumping due to the health hazards it unleashes.

Taking note of the protests, the Karnataka Pollution Control Board has ordered the closure of the Mavallipura landfill. The Karnataka high court has taken the authorities and the government to task for the chaos. It ordered the municipal authorities to submit a detailed report on the garbage crisis.

The agitating residents of Bengaluru’s suburban areas had earlier tried very hard to attract the attention of the authorities to the increasing hazard of being surrounded by urban waste. But the callous BBMP authorities turned a blind eye to their entreaties. When the people’s patience ran out, they resorted to a massive agitation that caught the authorities unawares.

The state government, in an effort to avoid greater embarrassment, transferred the city commissioner Shankar Linge Gowda, and replaced him with Rajaneesh Goel. This has, at best, been a ploy to suppress the ire of the public.

In Bengaluru, approximately 5,000 tonnes of garbage are generated every day. The quantum of waste is rising each passing day thanks to the rapid growth of the city. There is no doubt that neither the bureaucrats nor the legislators had ever seriously thought of a scientific plan for the disposal of the city’s waste.

Neither did the municipal authorities try to bring civil society members and environmentalists on board to chalk out an appropriate garbage disposal plan. There have been many experiments in other parts of the country pertaining to urban waste management such as the ‘Nagpur Plan’, which envisages a garbage bin–free environment.

What the authorities have done so far is finding a few stray places on the periphery of Bengaluru for the disposal of garbage. They never thought of a scientific approach to garbage disposal by establishing mechanisms for segregating and recycling the waste.

Now the BBMP authorities are striving hard to convince residents near the landfills to call off their agitation. Venkatesh Murthy, the BBMP mayor, told TSI, “A meeting has been convened with the people of Manduru. We assured them that they face no health hazards and that their water is perfectly safe. So they have now agreed to allow dumping to go on. We are going to do the same with the residents of Terra Firma.”

Regarding the Mavallipura landfill, Murthy said: “We will not be dumping any more garbage there. We will also set up segregating procedures there for the garbage already dumped.”

A few days ago, Karnataka Health Minister Aravinda Limbavali had stated that the city’s garbage would be sent to other dumps in Chintamani near Kolar. All of a sudden, the state government and the BBMP are all at sea. This is the result of the continued shortsightedness of the authorities.

Not surprisingly, the crisis has given the opposition parties a handy stick to beat the government with. They have alleged corruption in the granting of the tender to a private company for the disposal of waste. This is not an improbability either. In fact, BBMP has spent crores of rupees for the disposal and segregation of garbage. But the result on the ground is there for all to see.

Experts warn that the garbage mess could get much worse if all the parties concerned do not pull their weight. The government, local authorities, businessmen and each and every citizen of the city have to adopt measures to minimise the problem, they say.

All eyes are now on the new commissioner Rajaneesh Goel, who assumed office in late August. He belongs to Chandigarh, one of India’s best planned cities, and residents of Bengaluru are hoping that he would be able to put in place practical methods of ridding their beautiful city of its garbage mess without having to raising a stink.

harsha.kumar@thesundayindian.com