The Waste Land

 

This black spot on Wind Tunnel Road, Murugeshpalya, has acquired an air of permanency. This patch of land adjoining the HAL airport compound wall remains perpetually overrun by leftover food from households and eateries, and discarded household items like sofas and toilet commodes. 

Both BBMP and HAL have tried all the tactics in their rule book, but this area continues to be a sad reminder that we as a society still have a long way to go in keeping our surroundings clean.

During my morning walks I often see dogs, cows, and birds such as crows and eagles rummaging through the garbage pile for food. This foraging sometimes even results in ugly confrontations, with fights breaking out among the dogs or between crows and eagles. 

The volume of garbage piles varies – when BBMP marshals step up vigil and lie in wait to catch and fine the litterbugs, the pile appears relatively diminished, though the stench lingers on. 

But once they relax their vigil, ‘normalcy’ is restored. Most of the littering, I guess, happens during the night when the area becomes deserted and there is barely any traffic. There are no streetlights either.

But sometimes I come across some intrepid litterbugs who do so during the day, say around 7 am. They come in two-wheelers with the pillion rider carrying a large black polythene bag. The bike slows down near the spot, the pillion rider tosses off the bag, and they scoot off.

On social media we often come across social service organisations carrying out ‘spot fixes’ or makeovers of such black spots, but no such luck for this area.

This particular patch badly needs such a fix as it is not like any other black spot with garbage pile-ups causing inconvenience to nearby residents. Its close proximity to an airfield poses a potential hazard to planes operating out of this airport.

After commercial flights were shifted to BIAL in Devanahalli, HAL Airport has been mainly catering to Indian Air Force aircraft and some occasional VIP flights. 

As numerous birds frequent this garbage dump, this aggravates the risk of a bird-hit for aircraft operating out of HAL Airport. It also endangers the lives of our airmen, who fly fighter plane sorties and test flights on a regular basis. 

Their jobs are fraught with numerous risks, with death stalking at every step. In addition, they now have to contend with this occupational hazard of bird menace mainly because nearby residents and others have scant regard for civic sense.   

As people, we are ever eager to carry out token symbolism to show our love for armed forces like say changing the display picture of our WhatsApp status during Independence Day or Republic Day or posting pictures or videos on social media of soldiers carrying out some risky tasks in Siachen Glacier and other places that in turn attract numerous 'likes' from friends and followers.

But when it comes to doing something more concrete that may help our men in uniform, apathy reigns supreme.

So this spot continues to be in a mess and the stench becomes unbearable especially when it rains.

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Treating Garbage: Lessons From Oslo

The heat and dust of elections and the race to the gaddi at Vidhana Soudha may have pushed the city's garbage issue underground for now. But like a bad penny it cannot be wished away and its stench is only round the corner.

The much touted drive for waste segregation had met with limited success and is confined to few pockets. Deep seated habits like poor civic sense and caste prejudice, coupled with government's half-hearted measures have ensured that it is no way successful in mitigating the garbage pile ups that dot the city's street corners.

The other day I happened to read New York Times link forwarded by a friend on waste management done in the Norwegian capital Oslo. It was quite literally an eye opener. Oslo has a waste-to-energy incinearator on its outskirts and it turns garbage into heat and electricity. Roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage.

Households separate their garbage, putting food waste in green plastic bags, plastics in blue bags and glass elsewhere. The bags are handed out free at groceries and other stores. The plants uses computerised sensors to separate the color-coded garbage bags that race across conveyor belts and into incinerators.

Household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals is grist to the incinerator. Its appetite is so huge that the city's garbage is just not enough and hence it is shipped in from faraway places such as England, Ireland and neighbouring Sweden to keep the plant running. It has even set sights on the American market.

And mind you Norway is no way starved of fossil fuel reserves. It is a major exporter of oil and gas, and has abundant coal reserves.

In fact the whole of North Europe has become a hub for waste to energy plants and Oslo is now facing tough competition from Swedish capital Stockholm. Environmentalists there fear that in order to keep these plants running people may be encouraged to produce more waste!

It holds an important lesson not just to Bangalore, but to whole of India. The country is urbanising at a brisk pace and even Tier 2 and 3 cities are feeling the pressures of overcrowding and strain on infrastructure. Already our cities are getting reduced to eyesores and badly need such innovative measures to treat garbage.

Moreover with most parts of the country are reeling under power cuts, the power generated by these units could lessen burden on our power plants and grids. It will also lessen the environmental cost in setting up a thermal or nuclear plant. And I am sure that in India raw materials will never be a problem for these garbage plants.

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Trash At The Doorstep

Like any other Indian city Bangalore too has a primitive landfill method of disposing its waste, something it inherited probably from British Raj days. Then the city was a fraction of what it is now, both in terms of size and population. Little reforms or innovation have happened in this sector ever since.

I guess this has to do with the deep rooted caste system in the country, where jobs such as cleaning the streets, toilets and surrounding are looked down upon. Though the city transformed itself from pensioner's paradise to silicon valley, there has been hardly any change in the way the employees of this particular sector function.

The civic employees (or pourakarmikas) still use the same old broom and have to rely on bare hands to collect the waste. Moreover, it goes without saying that their pay and other service conditions are abysmal.

Until recently it was a heart wrenching sight to see some of the male civic workers, clad in loin clothes, descend into manholes to clear blocks. Thankfully after long drawn legal battles, we now see BBMP's Jetter machines carrying out the task. However since they are mounted on trucks, they do cause traffic snarls when they are at work in narrow bylanes. But this is a small price to pay to relieve the civic workers of their misery.

The mindset of city residents towards waste and its disposal is no way different from the rest of Indian public. As long as it does not prove an eyesore  or hit his nostrils, it is out of mind. This idyll, resting solely on complacency, came crashing nearly two and half months ago, when the civic workers went on strike as they had not got their salaries for three months. The problem got confounded when people staying near the landfills too rose in protest. They said their health and well being was being affected by incessant dumping of city's trash.

In the resulting standoff the city's street corners got dotted with ugly mounds of garbage, much to the delight of stray dogs, cattle and of course rats. They were not only eyesores and nausea inducing, but the city also witnessed an alarming rise in the number of dengue cases.

However, its not that the city fathers never thought of processing the waste. They made a half hearted effort by entrusting Ramky Infrastructure Ltd to set up a waste treatment plant at Mavallipura.

But things did not happen as planned. Ramky contends it was promised 100 acres land, but could get around half of it as 46 acres was under litigation. Hence they are able to process only 20% of waste and were not able to set up the proposed plant to generate power out of waste. But villagers allege that there is an unholy nexus between Ramky and BBMP officials and hardly any waste gets processed.

Another dimension to this problem is that due to the rising population and real estate pressures the buffer zone between the landfills and human habitations have thinned down. It used to be 1 kilometre, but now it is 100 metres.

Then BBMP came up with segregation at source mantra. Considering the kind of ‘civic sense’ a Bangalorean, or for that matter an Indian has, it was like expecting  juvenile home inmates to follow Sunday school teaching. Though the BBMP has rolled out the scheme, the response has been far from encouraging, barring few pockets.

Lots of questions remain. What constitutes a dry waste and wet waste is something many are still not clear about. Though BBMP has post haste brought in the segregation rule, it has done little to set up dry waste treatment plants.

The scenario in my area is that pourakarmikas have stopped taking waste from houses and it is being dumped at street corners. And newer mounds of garbage seem to be emerging and a lasting solution seems nowhere in sight.

The current rainy spell due to cyclone Nilam on Chennai coast is only making matters worse.

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