Residents mess up garbage disposal

A few other citizens want commons bins for waste dumping

Owners of multi-storied buildings are playing foul. Many apartments have fallen in line but it’s the multi-storied buildings that house more than 4-8 households that are playing foul. Added to that are new residents to the area who are unaware of garbage segregation. And where the residents want to do their bit, the house owners aren’t helping much.

“I reside in a building which has the ground floor and the first floor as commercial space, and the remaining three floors are residential,” says Sector 2 resident Sahadev C. “The owner says that we are not supposed to keep garbage for collection at the entrance since there are shops around and he says it is for parking, while it is not a parking space at all.”

The story does not end there. “When we said that he ought to provide garbage disposal provision to the tenants since he has constructed the residential spaces, he says he is not liable to provide that and goes on to say that he collects garbage and throws it in the drain near Mangammanapalya, and shouts on us saying we are not supposed to keep the garbage below,” says Sahadev.

The authorities resolved this issue after it was raised in the Residents Watch Telegram Group. “The owner is now paying the garbage contractor to come up to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floor every couple of days to collect the accumulated garbage,” says Sahadev.

However, where garbage collection is a problem because of the landlord, dog menace and so on, BBMP should keep common bins on every main thoroughfare for wet and dry waste collection manned by attendants, recommend a few residents.

In some houses, separate bins are not working because some tenants dump mixed waste into these bins. Says apartment resident Kamesh Rastogi: “Everyone feels it convenient to mix it and dump. We have done quite a lot of segregation workshops to overcome this and also imposed penalty where they didn’t follow the rules.”

The biggest problem in HSR and surrounding areas is this. Most tenants don’t stay for long. And the entire city is not segregating. So if a person from some other part of town is coming to HSR where mixed garbage is the trend, all the energy of the BBMP and volunteers is being spent on re-educating them. By the time, the tenants understand, they shift to some other place for some reason and the story is back to square one.

The only way this can work is if all of Bangalore segregates (right now, it stands at 38% according to BBMP) or better still, a solution needs to be found to accept mixed garbage itself and segregate elsewhere in a decentralised facility.

PROBLEM COMMUNITY
Multi-storied buildings where there is no association, the owner is not bothered and the tenants are erring as they are from areas where there is no segregation.