
In many parts of Bengaluru, cows foraging through heaps of garbage is a common sight. One such long-standing blackspot is in Jayachamarajendra Nagar (JC Nagar) near Benson Town. Neela, who runs a grocery shop right opposite the dump, says it has been there since she moved in three years ago; others claim it has existed for over a decade, while some residents say they’ve seen it all their lives.
The locality, a low to middle-income settlement with narrow lanes, does not receive door-to-door garbage collection. Instead, a tipper truck waits at a fixed spot where residents must bring their waste each morning, a system many find inconvenient. Though the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) cleans the site at least four times a day, fresh waste piles up within hours.
Despite several rules mandating segregation at source, door-to-door collection, dry waste centres, and separate handling of bulk and construction waste, poor enforcement and implementation have left the city dotted with blackspots. Visits to several such sites and conversations with residents reveal common patterns behind their persistence.
In most blackspots that we visited across the city, construction and demolition (C&D) waste serves as the base layer. Our earlier report showed how even government organisations like the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL) do not follow proper management of construction waste at the city’s Namma Metro construction sites. While guidelines for the management of C&D waste dictate that the BBMP portal should provide contact details for waste generators to hire transporters or empanelled vendors, no such details are available on the website.
“There are no dedicated ward-level collectors for construction and demolition waste — that’s a major gap. This needs to be streamlined if we want to manage C&D waste effectively,” said Anirudh S Dutt, founder of the waste management non-profit Let’s Be The Change. There are ways to repurpose some of the demolition waste, he noted, but lack of awareness means it often ends up on roads. “The system should ensure the public is made aware of this.”
An engineer at a construction site, who did not wish to be named, said he was unaware of any BBMP guidelines for disposal. Instead, they pay private lorry owners ₹1,500–₹2,000 to dispose of the site-generated waste, who dump most of it in landfills, paying ₹150–₹200 per load. “This has been the practice for many years,” he said.
A recent Deccan Herald report raised concerns over the award of five contracts related to C&D waste management — three for collection and transportation of debris to existing processing plants, and two for end-to-end operations — to one single firm. Despite these five contracts valued at ₹2,227 crore for a 15-year period, citizens are sceptical about whether a single firm can really improve and transform the state of C&D waste management that prevails.
Violations of basic rules — such as not dumping C&D waste on pavements, streets, or mixing it with other waste — have led to blackspots. “If the concrete waste had not been dumped in the first place, or at least cleared up sooner, maybe people would not dump garbage on top of it,” says Neela.
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On a service road adjacent to Outer Ring Road, connecting HSR Layout with Silk Board junction, dry leaf litter and other waste swept from the road have piled up high on the sidewalks. Ankit Bhargava, co-founder at Sensing Local, an Urban Living Lab points out how these affect footpath accessibility and walkability across the city: “Garbage blackspots, street litter and dry leaves are one of the most prominent and recurring barriers for pedestrians.”
“When footpaths are not maintained, it attracts more littering by street vendors, pedestrians,” says Ankit. According to him, compost bins for dry leaf and plant waste placed along the road could be a great solution.
As per rules, dry leaves are to be gathered by pourakarmikas by the roadside, from where the collection vehicles should pick them up. However, in summers, when the dry leaf litter becomes more voluminous, manpower proves to be a challenge leading to accumulation of such waste, says Meenakshi, a BBMP marshal.
What one finds is that these dumps also become spots for discarded sofas, toilet commodes, mattresses, and other dry waste. Disposal of such items is anyway a challenge, because the tippers cannot accommodate such waste. Dry waste like this should ideally be handed over to Dry Waste Collection Centers (DWCCs). But given the lack of awareness among citizens, and only 164 such centres — which translates to not even one collection centre per ward — they mostly end up in the blackspots by the roadside.
“Not all DWCCs are functional and only some centres that have space and vendors to manage them accept these wastes,” says Anirudh. JC Nagar, incidentally, does not have a functional DWCC.
The waste collected from roadsides by pourakarmikas are not collected by tippers and are usually seen lying around in huge bags on the roadside. “Capacity or manpower is a main reason,” says Anirudh.
Read more: Bengaluru knows the solutions to waste problems, but looks the other way
Open, unused plots that turn into de facto waste dumping sites make for another typical blackspot. Garbage dumped by local street vendors, shops and neighbouring residents are not cleared from these empty plots and are often burned, causing a significant spike in AQI.
Vivek, an independent public policy researcher and a resident of Bhoganahalli, Bellandur, shared with Citizen Matters a petition submitted to the Deputy CM. In the petition, he refers to an instance of such dumping and garbage burning in an open plot next to one of the gates of the Adarsh Palm Retreat Villas complex.
BBMP marshals have refused to clean the space, stating that it is private land. Vivek also points out that the land is under legal dispute, with none of the parties owning responsibility for its maintenance. However after several complaints, Vivek and other residents have now managed to get BBMP to put nets around the land.
This is another common pattern that we observed where private land under litigation or those with absentee owners becomes a garbage blackspot. The JC Nagar blackspot opposite Neela’s shop also incidentally stands on such land. In HSR Layout, we noticed garbage dumped inside private lands that were closed off by compound walls.
In several areas in the city, waste is shifted from tippers to compactors on public roads, causing traffic, stench, and spillage that creates blackspots. On Lavelle Road, resident Siddharth Thomas said two compactors are now parked daily, collecting waste from tippers in the morning and disposing of them, before returning to the same spot.
The 2020 Solid Waste Management Byelaws mandate that tippers or primary collection vehicles transfer segregated waste to designated stations or secondary transfer points, where they are fed directly into portable compactors or secondary storage facilities without any manual roadside handling. Yet, roadside transfers continue across the city. “Even after several complaints, the situation on Lavelle Road remains unchanged,” says Siddharth.
The socio-economic demographics of neighbourhoods must be kept in mind while tackling the issue of effective waste collection and disposal. In low-income and informal settlements, poor collection thus remains a major problem. The system needs to step up by ensuring door-to-door collection and collection at a convenient time for residents.
BBMP Marshall Meenakshi says, “Migrant workers and some newer communities lack awareness about the importance and process of proper waste disposal and tend to throw garbage on the streets.” But Pinky Chandran, an independent researcher who tracks policy and legal developments around waste management and its intersections, explains the real issue.
Pinky recalls one of her consultations with the JC Road community, where the residents are mostly municipal workers, waste pickers and pourakarmikas. “While they start their work early in the morning to clean our city, no one is there to collect and dispose of their household waste,” she says. The residents here want waste collection to happen when they are home.
Neela also says, “People like us work as domestic help in other homes. Domestic workers segregate the waste in other people’s houses and dispose of it, but they don’t have time in the morning to do all that in their own homes.”
Smaller shops and street vendors are often left clueless about where to dispose of their wastes as the tippers arrive much before the shops open.
G Nagaraj, founder of The Indian Ploggers Army and popularly known as Bengaluru’s Plogman, says that a separate team should do door-to-door collection in these neighbourhoods and then dump the collected waste in tippers. “This is being followed in Koramangala by the BBMP and it has been relatively successful,” Nagaraj notes.
According to Meenakshi, there is a need for some improvement in manpower, but with a proper collection system in place, blackspots can be prevented. “The situation has improved a lot, and with continued awareness-building efforts, we believe we can eliminate blackspots entirely.”
“Setting up waste collection kiosks could be helpful in these situations,” says Anirudh. Every tipper collects waste from 700 to 750 households within a span of just four hours every morning, which gives them less than 20 seconds for each household, hampering effective collection. “Waste collection kiosks, especially at night time, when dumping in blackspots is prominent, could help reduce blackspots,” he says.
However, in affluent neighbourhoods, stricter enforcement of waste segregation, proper disposal and long-term measures to prevent blackspots (instead of temporary clean-ups) must be in place.
Blackspots are not just an eyesore. Vivek, in his petition, has called attention to several spots around his locality where garbage is set on fire often, affecting air quality and public health.
Rains make it worse, when apart from the stench, there is also a release of leachate from the dumps. These garbage dumps become breeding spots for mosquitoes during rains.
Even though BBMP cleans the spot daily, they don’t sanitise, complains Neela. “I myself have used bleaching powder a couple of times, but the BBMP doesn’t even do that” she said. Cows often end up eating plastic and other toxic waste here.
The BBMP and the city’s waste management authority have recently initiated an intensive clean-up drive to clear the blackspots in the city and paint or plant saplings in the location. However, most residents that we spoke to, told us even when blackspots are cleaned up regularly, they almost always get filled up with fresh waste in some time.
Neeth, a resident in Vidyaranyapura, talks about how even after The Ugly Indian, an anonymous volunteer group in Bengaluru, cleaned up a blackspot in her locality and painted the area, fresh heaps appeared at the spot after some days.
Many residents we spoke to feel that clean-up drives to fix particular blackspots do not serve the purpose sometimes as the cleaning itself is not as thorough as it should be. The waste may be removed but the leachate is not cleaned, there is no proper sanitation, and the stench remains. “If the collection and management can be improved, why would there be a need for clean-up drives?” questions Pinky, when asked about BBMP’s most recent plans.
Nagaraj feels any drive should be a collaborative effort. If BBMP cleans up an area, the locals should be mindful of keeping it clean. “Clean-up drives will not work if there is a lack of ownership among the public,” he says.
The city does have enough examples, though, of local residents stepping in when the system fails. In HSR layout, even after repeated complaints from residents to the BBMP, no action was taken to clear up a footpath piled with dry leaves and garbage. Hence, street vendors who had set up a nursery in the vicinity, cleaned up the spot and planted a few saplings to avoid garbage dumping.
This article is republished from Citizen Matters under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.