Waste management in Bengaluru city: It’s garbage!

Bengaluru: Garbage crisis, the veritable hot potato, is still too hot to handle and is moving from hand to hand. Whenever a new person comes into the system, one is hopeful of garbage crisis ending, but it only gets the better of them and leaves them singed. Even the High Court, which did an admirable job of managing the issue well for a while, seems to have retreated into a cooling period.

Those of us who have been seeing the garbage issue up close know that garbage has always been in ‘crisis’. If flashpoints seem to be recurring frequently in recent times, it’s simply because the affected communities have learnt not to suffer silently anymore. The awareness is high and the communities refuse to accept the threat of permanent damage to their living environment, and rightly so.

Yet, haven’t we done the right things as a city? We have a law for segregation at source, legislation to make it mandatory for bulk generators to manage their own waste, ward level collection and processing centres and we have even passed a law for plastic ban. Communities are organising themselves like never before and are coming out with innovative ideas to promote awareness and compliance. The marketplace has seen a mushrooming of solutions and service providers for managing waste. For the first time for any city, dedicated processing capacities have been built.
But then, why is waste still piling up on our streets and why are our landfills overflowing, triggering protests from villagers? It could be because our administration knows how to recognise and manage only crises. They can address issues and negotiate only in critical situations. Issues have to blow out of proportion before their attention could be drawn.

It seems that daily diligence, paying attention to detail and completing a job is left to the courts, which have in the last three years held monthly hearings, reviewed the situation and pushed for coordination. But the courts have suspended these monthly hearings for a while now. The danger is that with no one monitoring the system, it could slip into an unmanageable crisis again.  
The need of the hour is to set up reviewing and monitoring mechanisms, bring in technical expertise and support, and conduct performance audits and third party inspection systems at every level – be it the ward, the constituency and the zone – with strong citizen participation in committees.

In addition to lackadaisical administration, the fledgling SWM architecture is threatened with every new leader and officer, who sees himself as a swashbuckling buccaneer who will visit overseas and bring back new and better solutions. These officers do not recognise that the solution is ready and staring us in the face and it just needs a well oiled administrative machinery to scale up and deliver on a daily basis.

No opinion on solid waste management can ever be complete without a mention of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan. The programme, while being well intentioned, appears to be a funding platform with little or no convergence with the municipal solid waste rules. The programme has laid down clear funding guidelines, while being completely passive on the principles of sustainable solid waste management.

While there is no urgency from the central government to notify the rules which have been in draft stage for over a year now, the big concern is of the newly introduced cess on service tax that is going to fund completely superfluous, outrageously expensive and environmentally damaging incineration facilities in the name of waste to (renewable) energy plants.

(The writer is a member of Solid Waste Management Round Table, SWMRT, a citizen group which has been working since 2008 on sustainable, decentralised solid waste management in Bengaluru)

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