JOIN USFilth that came with 'Bruhat' tag
Hardly 10 years ago, farmers bringing vegetables to the K R Market in the City would never return to their villages with an empty cart.
They would take with them 'green waste' in abundance on a daily basis.
The rotten vegetables could not be sold to the customers, but farmers knew their importance as it helps increase the fertility of the land and the crop yield.
The long-practised tradition of taking ‘green manure’ to the farm has been stopped in Bangalore thanks to the advent of polythene cover, which gets mixed with vegetables.
Now, the same green manure is either dumped in the landfill or left to rot.
On many occasions, rotten vegetables, mixed with polythene bags, go straight into the stomachs of stray cattle in the market.
A major contributor to the garbage crisis in the City is the mindless use and disposal of polythene bags.
Rajanna, a trader at K R vegetable market, says, “Rotten vegetables are like gold, but not after they mix with polythene bags. Our problem increased because farmers are no more interested in green waste only because of plastic bags.”
Bygone glory
The garbage problem the City faces today comes as a stark reminder of a Supreme Court directive to the Union Government in 2003 to replicate the Bangalore model of municipal solid waste disposal in all the municipal bodies.
The SC directive underlined the best garbage disposal system the City had in place, remarked a Palike officer. He added that the City Municipal Corporation used to boast of being the first in the country to introduce door-to-door garbage collection, he added.
However, the problem aggravated in 2007, when 110 villages, one city municipal council and three town municipal councils were merged with the Bangalore Municipal Corporation to form the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike.
The villages, TMCs and the CMCs had their own garbage disposal in place before they were merged with the BBMP.
Once the merger happened, the newly added areas dumped their responsibility of garbage disposal on the BBMP.
The landfills around Bangalore, of which two are closed owing to public protests, were meant only for the disposal of garbage in the core areas of the City.
These landfills meant for 200 sq km of Bangalore could not carry the extra burden of garbage generated in 800 sq km.
Realty boom
The City had never anticipated that it would face a huge garbage problem by amalgamating 110 villages, a CMC and the three TMCs.
The formation of BBMP led to a realty boom, which ate up the areas around the landfill as one can witness at Mandur where at a stone’s throwaway a BMRDA-approved residential layout has come up.
To complicate the problem, the bad practices at the landfills led to public outcry against the municipal corporation resulting in the closure of the landfills.