The Bengaluru municipal corporation has initiated a campaign calling residents to segregate wet and dry garbage before disposal. While the citizens are willing to support the initiative, the corporation has not made adequate infrastructure facilities

Segregation of garbage—we and dry—the basic verities, besides others, go into effect from today, as per directives issued by the BBMP (Bangalore Bruhat Maha Palike), where the citizens have to play a vital role at the emanating point—their homes! Violators will be met with fines ranging from Rs100.

Garbage segregation at source would enable the Corporation to have the dry garbage collected and disposed off scientifically. Through the help of various NGOs, activists, industrial and environmental experts, plans are afoot to make the city a better place to live.

Bangalore generates roughly 4,500 tonnes of garbage a day. Although BBMP employees do the city cleaning, the garbage is also collected additionally by contractors with their own staff who truck down the rubbish to landfills located some 60 to 100 km outside the city limits.

Since adequate steps were not taken to convert these into power via incinerators, etc, areas surrounding the landfills have become the source of nuisance of bad smell, rodents, mosquitoes, dog attacks, etc. In fact, in the city itself, due to irregular and incomplete clearance of the garbage on a daily basis, most roads and side lanes have become dumping grounds for all the garbage. How the authorities are going to manage and monitor this growing nuisance is difficult to imagine.

Organizations like Sahaas have been educating the public on the issue of how to handle all types of garbage that every home produces viz, wet and dry, recyclable materials like paper, plastic, electronic items like battery besides sanitary napkins, medical wastes, etc.  Now the BBMP Commissioner Rajneesh Goel wants to have items like Tetra milk packs to be washed and dried before giving them away so that these can be recycled.

A laudable idea, really, but considering the shortage of water and the need to share the Cauvery river with Tamil Nadu, this process of cleaning up Tetra packs will be an additional burden on Karnataka’s water resources. Over a period of time, citizens should find a way to reuse the used water to clean such Tetra packs before handing them over to garbage collectors.

In the last fortnight, when the imminent issue of garbage segregation came to be the topic of discussion, for example, Sahaas and the Resident Welfare Association in Koramangala had their volunteers went on a house-to-house campaign of awareness to the already educated citizens on this issue. The citizens, while realising their responsibilities, feel that BBMP itself has not made adequate infrastructural facilities to make this work, though, cheerfully, they are ready, willing and able to support the campaign.

(AK Ramdas has worked with the Engineering Export Promotion Council of the ministry of commerce and was associated with various committees of the Council. His international career took him to places like Beirut, Kuwait and Dubai at a time when these were small trading outposts; and later to the US. He can be contacted at [email protected].)