Festival compounds City's garbage woes

The problem of garbage clearance has been compounded due to an increase in the waste generation in the City during Deepavali.

Although the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) had claimed that it would deploy additional trucks and pourakarmikas to clear garbage during Deepavali, heaps of garbage were seen lying uncleared in commercial as well as residential areas of the City.

Garbage has not been cleared for the past three days in crowded areas such as K R Market, Avenue Road, Cottonpet, Ragipet and Balepet in the central business district and residential areas of Basavanagudi, Malleswaram, K R Puram, Indiranagar and Koramangala.

Contrary to the announcement made by BBMP that it would deploy additional staff, the number of pourakarmikas who attended work during the festival days was obviously lesser than that on a normal working day.

While most citizens tend to put the blame on the civic body for not clearing the garbage, there are some concerned citizens such as Sharanya Chikanna, who has a different point to make: “Does the responsibility of keeping the city clean rest only with the BBMP?”

A resident of Nagavara, off Old Madras road, Sharanya said that she had noticed how the people had responded to the BBMP’s request to segregate garbage at source. “Knowing very well about the garbage clearance crisis, people, including those having spacious houses and lawns, choose to burst firecrackers on public roads. They do not bother about the garbage they are generating,” she pointed out.

Referring to the lack of civic sense among Bangloreans, a BBMP official said: “Most of the people do not segregate garbage. In market areas, where there are designated spots to dump garbage, people throw waste materials on roads. Public should contribute towards solving the problem and not compound it.”

Waste management

Global Initiative for Restructuring Environment and Management (GIREM) has said that it can offer a two-stream solution to treat wet and dry waste in a processed, systematic, scientific and scalable method at Assembly constituency level with active participation of elected representatives.

“Our approach is not only to segregate at source, but also to maintain the segregated waste till it reaches its destination” GIREM said in a press release. The first level of responsibility, however, must lie with the generators of waste, it added.