On the contrary: Garbage, a lethal weapon

I would like to begin this column with a confession: many moons ago, I used to write a food column for the Asian Age, a hobby that apparently caused my dear mother no small amount of mental anguish. "Don't worry son, it's only a start," she would fondly reassure me, "when they see you can write about silly topics like restaurants, I'm sure they'll give you more weighty subjects to cover. "The years have flown by and mothers know best, but one can only hope that her gimlet eye doesn't fall on a second successive trash column…

The report from Raaagini Jain and Almitra Patel, members of the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on Solid Waste Management, addressed to the BBMP Commissioner, makes for horrifying reading. They spent two days in Bellahalli on a Swachh Bharat mission for leachate treatment and their findings should make us all bow our heads in shame. "BBMP had initially assured Belahalli residents that 35 trucks of mixed waste would be dumped daily into bio-membrane lined quarry pits as a temporary emergency measure, until all compost plants became operational. Unfortunately, over 100 registered vehicles and almost as many undocumented loads of mixed waste are being dumped daily into unlined pits for the past six months."

Faced with 2000 MT of garbage and an upcoming global investor summit, the BBMP has fallen back on band-aid solutions. These consist of transporting and dumping Bangalore's garbage in quarries located in the boondocks and spraying bio-culture on the dump site, despite knowing this has been an abysmal failure in Mandur. These slipshod methods are justified by using the smokescreen of expert consultants from IISc. Your correspondent sent a detailed questionnaire to IISc's Prof G.L Sivakumar Babu, who promptly clarified, "These guidelines should not be implemented blindly; site-specific calculations and groundwater impact assessment studies need to be conducted prior to implementation." Using the fig-leaf of science, Belahalli has "won" the garbage merry go-round and its residents now wake up to the ghastly smell of untreated garbage and have to endure maddening swarms of flies throughout the day, while stoically accepting the fact that their children suffer terrible headaches.

Ms Patel says the leachate problem is an environmental time bomb that will pollute groundwater for miles around for decades to come. Crystal House, Delhi Public School and Manipal Global Education are just three of the several educational institutions that have chosen to locate in Belahalli where huge quarry pits, filled with black slurry, are now almost completely covered with floating waste. The present active unlined quarry pit has leachate buried deep below floating waste which is inaccessible for treatment and which has to be pumped to the surface immediately. The largest open leachate pond, two acres wide and 15m deep, is blanketed with a layer of oil(lemongrass for odour control, what an idea Sirji) that compounds the problem by preventing evaporation or oxygenation.

Ms Jain while offering immediate remedial solutions for both garbage and leachate says, "The only long-term solution is the strict and unconditional enforcement of source segregation of waste and its segregated treatment. Sadly every ward has dry waste collection centres, lying under-utilised, thanks to this callous attitude on the part of the BBMP. Ample open space is available in Belahalli for unloading wet waste in windrows for four weekly turnings to stabilize it for local farm use."

Ms Jain has implemented measures in Gurgaon for treatment of 1200-1500MT of waste per day which can be applied here. Thanks to a High Court directive, the BBMP has complied by sending only 300 MT per day of wet waste to Mavallipura. The experts feel it is critical to get a similar court order for the entire city ordering compliance with the SWM Rules 2016 if Belahalli and Mitaganahalli are to be saved.

When Thiruvananthapuram's dump was closed on court orders, they switched to an equitable policy of "Your WasteYour Responsibility" and the transformation was magical with enlightened citizens devising solutions for managing their wet waste on-site. Which is exactly as it should be, since reason and commonsense dictate that the filthy rich should not be allowed to dump their filth on their poorer neighbours. We need political and administrative will for enforcement of source segregation at all levels with strict penalties for non-compliance. Despair and fatalism is no excuse for inaction.

Tackling garbage segregation is easier said than done and it's easier to talk trash than do anything about it. EnterHasiruDala, who have stepped in to meet the demand for waste treatment. For just Rs 100/ per apartment per month, they offer holistic solutions for waste removal. Log on to www.hdinnovations.in or call 99665 12362 and do your bit for Bangalore without getting your own hands dirty. Other options are saahas.org and reddonatura or swmrt.com Just do it.

(Ajit Saldanha has a finger in the pie, and another on the political pulse. And when he writes, he cooks up a storm.)