Why we need a Dumping Saaku law

State, Market, Society

Every once in a while, there’s an article in the press about waste from a developed country being dumped in India. It’s the sort of thing that usually gets people worked up that someone is treating our country as a dumpsite rather than taking care of it themselves in their own land. If they were forced to do that, they might even consume less or at least pay the true cost of managing the mountains of waste they generate rather than fobbing the problem off to a poorer nation.

This is not very different from what the cities in India do to the villages around them. Rather than process Bengaluru’s waste within the BBMP limits, we’ve been sending it out to an assortment of rural landfill sites. In doing that, though, the shoe is on the other foot – we are the perpetrators, not the victims. Therefore, no one talks about it very much. The villages care, of course, but they’re usually ignored by those in power, much like our protestations about global dumping in India are ignored.

The lens of ‘rich and poor’ is not the only one through which this can be seen. When the two sides are clearly different in income levels, that becomes the default way of looking at the issue. But what if the two are more comparable? Would the situation be any different? We may be about to find out.

With the passage of the Greater Bengaluru Authority Act, the BBMP area plus some parts around it are about to be reconstituted into multiple municipal corporations. In one large BBMP, there isn’t much attention paid to how waste is handled anywhere within the jurisdiction, but with elected councils in each of the corporations, things will get trickier. Corporators in one council might say – and their voters might also demand – that waste from one city should not be allowed to enter another.

This was the premise of the Dumping Saaku law that Loksatta proposed in 2012, as the Karnataka Municipal Solid Waste Management Bill. If it had been passed then, it would have prohibited the transfer of waste from any municipal body outside its limits without the express permission of the State Government and also an acceptance vote by the elected body of the local area to which the waste is being sent. If anything, we need such a law now even more than we did a dozen years ago.

This is not a variant of the Not In My Backyard phenomenon that we’re familiar with. This is, in fact, the opposite of NIMBY. By demanding that other people’s waste cannot be dumped in our spaces, we would be accepting that our trash too cannot be sent away elsewhere.

Most economists and city planners agree that this is a useful restraint that cities must embrace. The cost of managing waste within our city limits will probably be higher than the cost of piling it up elsewhere or burning it far enough away that we don’t see or smell it. This logic should be extended to wastewater, and all sorts of other things we don’t want around us.

There are strong political reasons why such legislation is not already the norm, even after all the self-righteous noise we made about Swachh Bharat. Around the country, contractors make money by transporting and discarding waste. BBMP spends more than a tenth of its budget – and nearly a third of its discretionary spending – on such contracts. Like a lot of government expenditure, that is now a gravy train to nowhere.

We’ve been carrying burdens that we should have eased long ago. The result is that they are now more onerous and demand even stronger actions from us than if we had promptly addressed them earlier.
Stopping that clock is a permanent responsibility. When the elections to the new councils are held, it would be a fitting welcome to the regime if one or more of the newly formed local bodies were to pass a resolution that it will not accept municipal waste from any of the others.

In allowing city waste to be dumped in villages, the state government has been taking sides so far, preferring the seven million voters of Bengaluru to the few thousand that typically live in communities that are destroyed by our trash. The way to end that bias is to frame the problem correctly and give local voters and councils the power and the responsibility to manage their waste.