Bengaluru couple turn ‘garbage dump’ into coffee spot

Bengaluru: Can you clean an impossibly ugly garbage spot in three hours and make it clean enough to sit and have coffee there? It may sound too good to be true, but a couple in HAL Second Stage has done just that.

When pourakarmikas failed to collect garbage and BBMP wasn’t of much help either, Chitra and her husband, both members of HAL Civic Amenities’ Association, decided to roll up their sleeves and take it on themselves to clean the 12th A Main.

Ten days later, garbage, stench and squalor were things of the past. Says Chitra, “Garbage segregation has not actively started in our locality and our association has taken up initiatives to create awareness on this issue. During our campaigns, we noticed that there were several garbage-littered spots and the corner at 12th A Main was the dirtiest. After pooling in enough money, we ensured that the heaps of garbage were transported to processing plants.” The members got help from Indiranagar Rising and in two days the walls of the street were painted, plant pots were placed everywhere and the street wore a refurbished look.

Chitra and her husband sitting on the pavement which they had cleaned

Though clearing garbage was not a challenge, keeping  vigil to ensure that nobody dumped garbage at the same spot was tough, adds Chitra.   “Even if one person dumps garbage, many follow suit. And it’s not just passersby or the uneducated who dump garbage on the streets. Servants of the affluent and even the wealthy themselves violate rules. We had to keep a vigil to curb all this. While my husband monitored the place during early mornings and late nights, I watched during the day. After continuous monitoring, we were successful in preventing illegal dumping,” she says.

Chitra and her husband even shared a cup of coffee in the corner that was once a garbage dump. “It was symbolically done to show people that the place is not meant for dumping garbage,” smiles Chitra. Indiranagar Rising took to Facebook to share their success story. The members wrote: “It's been clean for 10 days now -- so this was just not a photo-op. No, the garbage did not shift elsewhere -- the root cause was addressed, and those who used to dump their rubbish here every day, stopped doing it - and gave their garbage to the designated collector (who also got his act together!).”