Who’ll clean up Namma Bengaluru?
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Hundreds of trolleys and pushcarts, an army of sweepers, foreign junkets for corporators to learn better garbage clearing practices... and still the city remains as dirty as ever with no visible result achieved from the crores apparently spent on disposing the nearly 4,000 tonnes of rubbish it throws up every day.
Every new mayor and deputy mayor makes a solemn promise to keep the city clean when taking office and ends his term exactly where he began it – with mounds of rubbish filling street corners and littering the roads, even in the upmarket localities. In the meanwhile a whopping Rs 300 crore is spent on garbage clearance and on introducing technology for recycling it with nothing to show for it.
Former JD(S) leader in the BBMP council, Padmanabha Reddy, who exposed a Rs 121 crore garbage scam involving contractors and officials last year, accuses the ruling BJP of bowing to the contractors’ lobby and letting the city’s interests slide. “Officials also connive with contractors, ignoring Bengaluru’s needs,” he charges, adding, “Last year, the BBMP awarded a garbage clearing contract worth Rs 80 crore through tender and works worth Rs 120 crore were given to contractors without floating of tenders, which makes it difficult to make them accountable for the work they do.”
Mr Reddy also claims the ruling BJP in the BBMP has violated the Karnataka Transparency in Public Procurement (KTPP) Act and the Karnataka Municipal Corporations (KMC) Act 1976 and awarded contracts for clearing garbage across seven zones, except Bommanahalli. “The garbage mafia is so strong that the BBMP is not able to bring in new contractors for the job. So the city remains dirty although the civic agency collects as much as Rs 24 crore in a solid waste management cess,” he regrets.
Despite the problems dogging garbage collection, members of the health committee and deputy mayors make a pretence of trying to learn better ways of handling it by sprinting off to Israel and other countries and studying their solid waste management systems. Inevitably these ‘study trips’ turn into pleasure junkets that benefit no one but those who go on them using the taxpayers’ money.
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