Russel Street, off Park Street, is among the poshest addresses anyone in Kolkata can think of. Queen’s Mansion adorns one corner, the venerable Bengal Club resides opposite and a little down the road rests the old world elegant offices of the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, or used to.
Today the edifice is a shabby shadow of its formal self and, as if to add insult to injury, there springs up on the road before it through late night and early morning a massive garbage dump that takes up a third or more of the wide road. By about 10 o’clock most days, the garbage is gone and the road is washed. Then cars jostle there for scarce parking space, but the stain shows and the stink faintly lingers.
Then as evening turns into late night, people from around the area come and deposit garbage there and in the morning, it is again officially a garbage vat where Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) sweepers come in a steady stream with carts full of garbage of every conceivable kind.
Close on their footsteps follow the ragpickers who busily get down to sorting the trash and recovering whatever is recyclable. Between seven and nine or so, usually two full truckloads of garbage gets carried off and another day in the life of a beleaguered city with creaking municipal services is underway.
It’s not as if nothing has changed. If you look around, on the opposite side of the road, next to the rear entrance of ITC’s landmark head office, on a portion of the pavement stands the archaeological remains of what used to be the original garbage vat. It is marked by low side walls as vats usually are. These are now blackened with age but through most of the day there is no garbage to enclose.
It seems in the mid-2000s the ITC people were able to get the KMC to remove the festering sore, but all that they succeeded in doing was to shift the vat to the other side of the road, on the road itself, where ragpickers get more space to do their sorting more thoroughly. Today, through the night, many bring and dump garbage in the new vat as well as old, out of habit.
But the old vat is cleared and the space washed very early, and by daybreak, long before the ITC people come to work, the vat that was gone for another day comes back again in the darkness of the night. The bottom line is that in place of one vat earlier there are now two, one official and one unofficial, one in daytime and one nocturnal.
If you want the statistics, about 20-25 tonnes of garbage gets taken away daily by three trucks, two for the new vat and one for the old, owned either by the KMC or private contractors, manned by either KMC employees or those of the contractors. The city has 602 such vats from which around 5,000 tonnes of garbage is removed daily. Those unfortunate enough to live near a vat with its stink and health risk cry their head out trying to get the vat to go somewhere else.
When teachers at the reputed Lady Brabourne College heard that my friends and I were trying to clean up a corner of the city, they pleaded with us to do something about the vat behind the college whose stink had vitiated their lives for long. Being teachers, their own efforts did not even have the partial success that the ITC folks had. All we could do was study the product life cycle of the daily vat so that one day, if someone in authority wanted to rid the city of these atrocities, she would have some factual contours to go by.
It is not as if the city was always like this. I remember seeing garbage vats dot the city from my schooldays. But change came in the early 90s through the efforts of a dynamic municipal commissioner, Asim Barman, who transformed the conservancy department and changed the face of the city, ridding it of the filth on its streets. Then Subrata Mukherjee, on becoming mayor, took a step forward and till 2005, garbage collection and vat clearance took place every day promptly, and some who still tried to dump garbage on the road actually got booked.
But after Mukherjee, under the Left Front’s stewardship of the KMC, things slid back. Today there is a bit of change again, with the KMC passing into the hands of the Trinamool Congress. Garbage clearance has improved a little, vats are getting cleared a bit faster and earlier in the day.
But nobody is claiming that the problem is anywhere near solution. An unresolved big issue is ragpickers. In the age of recycling, they perform a socially highly useful function, but the middle class simply wants them banished, never mind how they will eke out an existence. Those Kolkata’s vats that linger and get spread out have little armies of ragpickers working diligently on them, doing a thorough recycling job.
For vats to go away and recycling to move forward what you need is sorting of garbage at the origin (at homes and business establishments), its quick transportation to the dumping ground, another round of sorting there by ragpickers, taking away of the recyclables (metals, plastic, glass), treatment of bio-degradables and finally burial of the residue.
