The fresh good feeling of early morning was gone the other day when I went down to fetch the papers from our doorstep. Just next to the iron gate that leads onto the road stands a pedal bin, its lid covering a black plastic bag full of garbage, tied up with a string and waiting to be taken away during the day when the stuff gets collected.
The Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike tempo that plays a tune and collects the garbage had not come for three days in a row. So the pedal bin lid could not close, since there were in it three, not one, bags full of rubbish. Seeing the opportunity, some street dog had in the night sought to forage in the garbage, torn the plastic apart and scattered the three-day-old refuse all over the pathway to the gate.
Most Indian urban spaces are filthy, the unplanned confusion of out-in-the-open living made worse by refuse strewn around freely. It hurts the eye more in Bangalore because, in parts, it is elegant, pleasant and very livable, but is declining by the day along with an increasingly dysfunctional municipal administration, which gets garbage collected in fits and starts.
Both residential and commercial areas in the city are now dotted with informal and semi-formal garbage dumps along roadsides. I see every day the losing struggle that a wealthy doctor couple, who has built an impressive large house, is waging against the informal rubbish heap that has come to stay in front of their house. It is cleaned up every so often. Sometime in between a sign came up saying that it was illegal and punishable to dump garbage there, but the filth at the spot has a life of its own.
The same is true of another spot right next to several posh shops on 100 ft Road in Indiranagar, which has in a few years become one of the major shopping areas in the city, with some of the best known brands flaunting their exclusive showrooms. The garbage must be getting cleaned up periodically or else it would have taken over the entire width of the pavement. But it never goes away completely, a standing testimony to the indifference, impotence and lack of outrage on the part of people like me who live in the area. The story and the sight are repeated in area after area. And if there is a vacant plot, then the garbage dump expands merrily and becomes not a small eyesore but a large one.
It is not as if this is peculiar to Bangalore. I have grown up around street garbage in Kolkata, famous for its filth and squalor. Then, miraculously, in the early 2000s the streets were cleaned up when Subrata Mukherjee became mayor. And when he ceased to be the mayor in the latter part of the decade, the city retraced its way back to its earlier eyesores.
Kolkata now, and earlier too except during the brief interregnum, is famous for its garbage vats, official collection points that take up a good part of the pavement, spill over on to the carriageway and become informal home to rag pickers who live by sorting out the waste, retrieving the recyclables and selling them to aggregators, who make up a massive supply chain for the recycled stuff.
Bangalore, interestingly, also in the early 2000s, had a period in the sun when it was able to beat the pressures of rapid expansion and remain reasonably clean. A unique public-private partnership, the Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), initiated an innovative programme called the Swachha Bangalore. Under the programme, garbage was collected from door to door and dispatched out of the city before the day was far gone. At the heart of the programme was the Shuchi Mitra in every neighbourhood, a lady who volunteered to supervise the garbage collection and citizens’ participation, for free. The programme died when there was a change of government and BATF was buried.
It takes very little to keep a city, which can collect tonnes of property tax if it wants to, reasonably free of filth. To remove slums you need to build houses, to tackle water logging you need to construct sewers, to ease transport woes you need more road space, buses or the metro. Compared to these bills, the one you need to foot to reasonably manage solid waste disposal is small.
But a few problems have to be solved along the way. One is finding dumping grounds or landfills where garbage can be deposited. No one wants such a facility anywhere near his neighbourhood. But there is a way out. Segregate the garbage as much as possible, take away the recyclables, treat the compostables and then burn or bury the rest — which has by then reduced much in volume, and therefore needs far less space than the original unsegregated and untreated stuff.
But who will segregate the rubbish? Householders in cities in developed countries and many others, too, segregate their waste before passing it on. In Kolkata and many Indian towns and cities, it’s the rag pickers in the city who segregate waste, delaying garbage clearance and perpetuating fearsome garbage dumps.
There is a solution to that — create rag pickers’ colonies near the dumping grounds. Middle- class fears that these will become festering sores and breeding grounds for crime need not come true. Some imaginative planning and a few dedicated NGOs can turn these colonies into livable spaces where the poorest can earn their keep, learn skills and eventually leave for a better life.
Should we not try to have garbage-free cities before we aspire to become a superpower with a seat at the Security Council high table, with or without nuclear capability?
