Most Indian cities have problems in disposing their waste but some have managed to benefit from it by setting power plants and bio-gas plants. When will the planners of Bangalore wake up?
 
Frustrated by the inaction and at most times by inadequate clearing methods, Bangalore, the Silicon capital of India has degenerated into a garbage city from its premier position as the
Garden City of India, said, MLA, Ramalinga Reddy while addressing a large crowd of irate denizens of Bangalore in front of the Total Mall recently.
 
The Bruhat Bangalore Mananagara Palike, also known popularly as BBMP, is responsible for the collection and disposal of the city’s garbage, estimated to be around 5,000 tonnes per day!
 
This waste comes in various forms and shapes. It consists of wet waste (kitchen waste like vegetable peals, stems, etc and left-over food; dry waste covers paper, plastic and other items of metal, unusable scrap; electronic waste appears in the form of batteries, CDs, cartridges, etc while bio-medical waste comes mostly from hospitals but includes items like diapers, sanitary napkins, blades, torn clothes, etc.
 
The city has been divided into 198 wards, each having a counsellor. A garbage contactor employs sweepers to collect the rubbish and sweep the roads, leaving the materials in suitable locations for the BBMP trucks to collect. The BBMP has some 18,000 pournakarmikas (staff!) to load and carry the same to drop them off in assigned landfills, located away from the city, at such places like Mavallipura, Mandur and Terra Firma in Doddaballapur.
 
The problem recently became acute due to the protests by residents in the landfill areas who blocked the routes to the locations, thus forcing the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board to order closure of the site. And, the result was uncollected garbage lying all over the city, making Bangalore a stinking metropolis!
 
Discussions with experts, officials and environment specialists reveal that up to 50% of the daily household waste can be identified as “wet waste” that needs to be separated and can be processed into organic manure. Careless residents tend to mix up the wet waste with others making  disposal of the garbage unmanageable, resulting in bad odour, stray dog nuisance and fertile ground for germs to grow, including mosquito menace, and the root cause for all sorts of seasonal diseases. If rains fall it creates a further mess.
 
It may recalled that India had received hundreds of container cargo, supposedly carrying scrap, but which turned out to be actually bringing in highly toxic materials into the country! It took quite a while before the government machinery could stop this nefarious practice, as shippers were simply untraceable.
 
Now, let us take a look at how the daily waste is disposed elsewhere in the country.  It is estimated that India generates around 70 million tonnes of waste every day, but, we have still not got around to converting this into a usable media for power generation.
 
In Delhi, by the end of this year, the second waste-to-energy plant generating electricity will go on  stream. These plants use most modern technology and the electricity produced at the Timarpur Okla plant is 16MW, while at Ghazipur the capacity is 10-12 MW. These plants generate power by burning the waste, while environmentalists argue and suggest that better ways would be to convert wet waste to compost for ecological reasons, thus benefiting by this method. But tackling this needs inherent cooperation from each and every household to take pains to separate wet and dry waste, and a good, organized collection agency is able to take care of it every day.
 
 Despite the establishment of several solid waste-treatment plants in Kerala, protests by residents in the areas have made the working difficult. Yet, six biogas plants have managed to function but the waste management crisis in the state has become a major development issue.
 
Chennai has an estimated 4,000 tonnes per day garbage for disposal, which continue to be dumped at assigned landfills, though, recently, couple of multinational companies have proposed to set up a modular plant with a10,000 tonnes per day capacity. Several community-oriented past moves by Exnora International, Neel Metal Fanalch, and finally by Ramky Enviro Engineers, who have started working in January this year hope to keep the city as clean as possible.
 
Finally, in Pune, it has recently been reported, that Pune Municipal Corporation has been able to rope in Corcord Blue Technology to handle about 1,400 tonnes of garbage that the city generates, and when the project is completed, it will be able to generate 10 MW of power every hour.
 
(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].)