If we came back late in the evening, we could stop our car near paddy fields and hear frogs singing," says 79-year-old Almitra Patel, whose bungalow in Kothanur is located on the eastern edge of Bengaluru, surrounded on all sides by high-rise apartments.
When Patel, an alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with her husband moved to the village of Kothanur from Mumbai in 1972, the city limits ended at the railway crossing at Lingarajapuram, located about seven kilometres away. Theirs was the fourth village along the state highway.
However, by around 1990, the frogs stopped singing, she says, when the city corporation decided to start dumping waste on a plot of land nearby.
Angry with the destruction of the pristine rural countryside she had come to call home, Patel started petitioning the authorities to identify a spot where the city's waste could be disposed in a scientific manner. In 1996, she filed the first public interest litigation petition in the Supreme Court, calling for legislation to regulate the disposal of waste. She was made a part of the expert committee that eventually came up with the Municipal Solid Waste Rules, 2000.
And yet, almost 20 years from the time the PIL was filed, Patel is far from pleased with the way Bengaluru handle waste. On August 27, one of the two landfills in the Doddaballapur district, located just outside the city, caught fire. Residents of the area had been protesting since March 20, when the other landfill in the area had caught fire.
As a result of the Municipal Solid Waste Rules, the Bengaluru city corporation (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, or BBMP) has followed a pattern of identifying land for dump yards outside the city limits, and shifting to a new location once residents there start to protest.
In 2010, it was residents of Mavallipura who were up in arms over two landfills located near their village. Eight years of living next to landfills had taken a toll on them. "Asthma, meningitis and cancer are just some of the diseases we have become familiar with since the landfill came up here. We used to be prosperous farmers once," says Ramesh, a resident of Ramagondanahalli village. "On my two-acre plot, I used to grow buckwheat. Today, we have reached a situation where we need to spray pesticides even for buckwheat, which is supposed to be very resilient."
The milk the farmers' cattle produces fetches a penalty price of Rs 19 a litre as against an average Rs 23 because it does not contain the required amount of fat.
Yet, repeated requests for health camps and cattle surveys have gone fallen on deaf ears. "We suspect that our problems are because of the landfill. But let them conduct a scientific study and tell us if we are wrong," says Ramesh.
The extent of the problem in Mavallipura was understood only in 2010, after Environment Support Group, a non-governmental organisation, published a report titled Bangalore's Toxic Legacy, on the impact of the landfill on the area. It found that groundwater in the area was contaminated with high concentration of heavy metals because leachates from the landfill had seeped into the ground.
After concerted pressure, the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board, too, conducted a study in the area, which found that the environment in the area had indeed been adversely impacted.
How it began
Around the time Patel was petitioning the local authorities to force them to deal with the waste dumped in her area, she met J S Velu, a member of ExNoRa, a Chennai-based organisation that had mobilised solid waste management at a local level in some areas in the city. They tried to organise scientific management of waste in Bengaluru together.
"When the Surat plague broke out in September 1994, Velu said India was sitting on a time bomb." They decided that they would visit 30 cities in 30 days in Patel's high-roof Maruti van to spread the message of scientific disposal of waste.
Patel says they were battling two changes that occurred in the 1960s, which altered the composition of waste and its perception as a resource. "First was the plastic yug. Initially, people would save plastic bags and reuse them, but as it became more easily available, they would dispose it with their kitchen waste."
The other change, she says, was the Green Revolution and the subsidy on urea. "Earlier, farmers used to come to towns and cities to sell their produce and also buy the city compost waste." The government, however, began promoting NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potash) and not carbon, "and CNPK is what is needed".
A path to recovery
In 2012, while hearing a PIL petition about the dumping of waste in Bengaluru, the High Court of Karnataka directed the civic authorities to ensure segregation of waste at source. It also directed the authorities to set up dry and wet waste processing units in every ward - a remarkable attempt at decentralisation of waste processing.
This, it was hoped, would ensure the quantum of waste dumped at landfills is reduced. Three years after the court issued these directives, many areas in the city boast of such centres.
The dry waste processing centre for Pattabhiramnagar is an example. Mansoor, 31, sits behind his desk at the entrance as two waste collectors bring in the loads. "My family has been associated with this business for over 30 years. My father used to be a scrap dealer, and after dropping out of school in class V, I decided to join the business too," he said.
In 2012, Hasiru Dala, an NGO that works with waste collectors, came to his rescue. As the plan for decentralisation took shape, they started helping people like Mansoor get contracts for waste processing centres.
"BBMP's autos collect waste from houses and sell it to us. We, in turn, sell the waste to wholesalers because large processing units need at least one or two tonnes of waste, which one centre cannot generate. We are trying to coordinate with other ward-level units," says Mansoor.
Understanding the fine-print
"There was a problem initially because of a comma. The rules said the municipal authority shall collect waste, and segregate it. They understood this to mean that they would collect unsegregated waste and then process it," says Ajesh Kumar, the lawyer for the petitioner in the PIL, about the initial approach of BBMP to the garbage problem.
The other problem, he says, was that there were NGOs dealing with the problem in each ward. "They were all living in their own islands." Then his wife, Miriam, came up with the idea of having a roundtable "like King Arthur's", which would later be called the Solid Waste Roundtable.
The Bench of Justices B V Nagarathna and N Kumar asked the petitioners what they thought was the most pressing issue. The unanimous response, says Miriam, was segregation. "That was path breaking. Nobody has to wrestle with the word segregation anymore because of the court," he says.
Then in 2013, the Comptroller and Auditor General found large-scale corruption by contractors transporting waste to landfills. It found that many of the registration numbers of vehicles that had supposedly visited the landfills to dump waste - which had been noted down in a register according to the norms - were auto-rickshaws, bikes and scooters. As a result, the quantum of waste generated in the city could not be ascertained, with many NGOs saying there was gross overestimation.
This, Miriam points out, was because private contractors were paid by the tonne for the waste they transported, and landfills for the amount processed. Patel says the problem with paying per tonne is that wet waste and dry waste like plastic are relatively light. Contractors added bulk to the waste by carrying construction debris and silt, among other things, she says.
The other major direction was to constitute ward committees. "The councillor now has a constitutional post as chairperson of the committee. This allows citizens to file a writ petition if work is not done. A councillor cannot otherwise be hauled to court for not doing her duty," says Miriam.
Patel's dream of having waste disposed at a designated spot has now turned into a nightmare. "The waste that was earlier spread over 10 km of highways is now being dumped in one village."
With another round of protests in Doddaballapur in early November against the landfill, the residents of villages in Bengaluru's periphery are questioning the price they have to pay for their proximity to the city.
