It has been close to four months since the garbage in Bangalore spilled out of dustbins, on to the streets, and then stayed there in stinking piles, provoking anger and comments that Garden City had become Garbage City. The mounds of rubbish are now being lifted off the roads but the government and civic agencies are yet to figure out a permanent solution to the crisis, provoking the courts to haul them up. A combination of reasons led to the pile-up, from the forcible closure of landfills by villagers living around it to strikes by pourakarmikas (as the cleaners are called). But Almitra Patel, whose petition to the Supreme Court in 1996 to stop open dumping of waste in cities resulted in the landmark notification of the country’s first rules on municipal solid-waste management, says the crisis is self-inflicted, with the government failing to ensure proper functioning of composting plants.
A diminutive, white-haired figure, 76-year-old Patel is an engineer by profession, with an MS from MIT, and had always been interested in, and involved with, environmental causes, serving as honourary project officer to save the Gir lion, among other things. She became involved with urban civic issues when Bangalore city garbage started being dumped in her village on the outskirts, resulting in multiple hazards, from the spread of diseases to a dangerous stray dog menace. “When I raised the matter with one of the senior-most officials in the health department, his response was ‘What are you complaining about; Magadi Road is much worse’. That was the turning point for me,” says Patel. As part of her efforts, Patel teamed up with the non-profit ExNora for its “Clean India” campaign, visiting 30 municipalities in 30 days from Surat to Delhi, to observe waste management practices (which those days consisted largely of using the highways outside the city limits to dump garbage).
What she saw during her tour convinced her there was no recourse but to approach the Supreme Court, asking that state governments be directed to provide space to the 300 cities in the country for waste management. The government asked Patel to be part of the committee formed at the behest of the Court which framed the rules for solid-waste management. The committee’s two most significant suggestions, she says, were that municipal authorities “adopt suitable technology to make use of waste so as to minimise burden on landfills” and for “biodegradable waste to be processed by composting, anaerobic digestion or any other appropriate biological processing”. Neither, sadly, is being implemented today. All cities were also given sites to process waste and composting facilities were also set up, but Patel says they are not being used as they were supposed to be.
“It is corruption that is coming in the way of proper waste management,” she says. There is a lot of money to be made in the transport of waste, (which has been privatised in Bangalore), with payments made per trip or according to tonnage, so there is no incentive for contractors to minimise waste collected, she explains. This money, she says, is paid as kick-backs to politicians and bureaucrats. The other factor at play is real estate. The buffer zone around waste management sites is supposed to be a kilometre in Bangalore but it has been reduced to 50 metres. “With politicians entering the real-estate business, land near compost plants is bought cheap, as owners are told they will not get better rates as it is a dirty area. They then use their clout to shrink the buffer zone and to shut down the processing plants, which means the property value immediately shoots up 10 times.”
Patel is part of the expert committee convened recently by the commissioner to find a way out of the current mess. But for that, there needs to be administrative will and perseverance, she says. “The intention is there but there are many who have been benefitting from the way things are. They will not like to see the waste volumes go down, or dry waste go out of their hands. Corruption in the waste management sector is what has been keeping India dirty,” reiterates the veteran eco warrior.