Meet Anil Benni, HSR”s waste supervisor who has won many hearts
Anil Benni (38) is one of those rare individuals who impresses you with his prompt customer service. As the chief garbage supervisor for HSR Layout ward for the last 18 months, he has been doing an exceptional job for the residents. His areas include Sector 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7. In addition, he is also in charge of Iblur, Rajiv Gandhi Nagar, Guntoop, Muneswara Layout, Yellukunte, Vinayak Nagar and IAS Officers Colony. What makes him so endearing is his response time. The residents post their grievances on their respective Whatsapp groups or message him and he is quick to send his men to address the issue. The problems can be quite varied. If it’s the landlord not keeping a separate place for tenants to dump their garbage, to wet, dry and reject (sanitary) waste not being collected regularly, to waste not being cleared from the roadsides, drains and vacant sites. The problems are aplenty but Anil does not bat an eyelid and is on the job without passing the buck or twiddling his thumbs.
Anil’s day begins at 4am. He starts with a light stretch and a little bit of yoga. He ensures that he doesn’t miss his morning prayer. “I ask for god’s help in making me take the right decisions for everyone’s well-being,” says Anil. And then, he begins his day of managing egos, creating awareness and tackling any logistical issues. “People complain about desilting drains, and I tell them that it is the BBMP engineer’s job. Similarly, we don’t lift construction debris – it is the responsible of the house owner to arrange for a tractor and send it to low-lying areas or upcoming new layouts. There is no specific area provided by BBMP for this.” But this is rarely the case. “The tractor guys make false promises to the customer and end up dumping the debris near lakes, road sides or places where no one questions them. Most of the time, this happens after midnight or early in the morning.”
But the most common problem is the lack of awareness on waste segregation, says Anil, who was previously part of Airtel and HDFC Bank’s sales team. “Every six months, there are new residents who come from other wards or states where there is no such garbage disposal mechanism,” he says. “We have to go back to square one and educate them about separating the waste into wet and dry and giving them to us on specified days (dry and reject waste is collected on Wednesdays and Saturdays and wet waste on other days). If there are strict clauses on garbage segregation made in every rental and lease agreement that the tenants are made to sign, it will be a responsible step taken by the owners.”
Managing a team of 240 isn’t easy. He has three supervisors, 17 autos, 34 auto drivers and helpers, 120 waste pickers (pourakarmikas) and 66 labourers (gang men). He admits that it was tough when he first came on to the scene. He even thought of quitting the job because there were too many ego issues among the people he had to manage. Not to mention, the attitude of residents who didn’t bother segregating the garbage and instead created black spots (a non-specified place where garbage is thrown). Eventually, what made him overcome this was his ‘attitude and will power’.
Closer home, the seniors in his team considered him a newbie and didn’t allow him to implement newer ways of functioning. Fed up with this mindset, he quit. But his bosses, garbage contractors Roopesh and Babu, didn’t let him. Realising that Anil was the man for the job, they gave him all the rope he needed to rein in his team. “With immense faith in me, they permitted me to do whatever I felt was the right thing to do,” says Anil.
The next day, Anil called for a meeting of all the men who worked under him. “I had a list of rotten apples to deal with,” he says. “I tried the age-old method of divide and rule. I divided the pourakarmikas into 12 teams and gave the responsibility to one leader for each team. This minimised the power of one person commanding the entire team.”
After having neutralised the power of one senior pourakarmika over all the others, he made all the waste pickers carry a notebook with them every day. “The idea was to reach those residences who were not in the residents’ Whatsapp groups,” says Anil. This measure put the breaks on auto drivers and helpers who never listened to anyone and worked according to their whims and fancies. What’s more, Anil changed the route of the autos based on the complaints from residents.
In addition, he began to get his name added on to the residents’ Whatsapp groups, to intimate them the exact location of the auto. This way, he involved the residents to monitor the autos as well. “I actively started responding to people’s complaints in the groups,” says Anil. “I made a promise to myself that I would attend to complaints within 10 minutes. It was hard in the beginning but I was satisfied when I saw the change in the percentage of complaints from 80% to 1%.”
His next goal was to eradicate the black spots that were festering in the neighbourhood for many months. He drew up a list and met some of the residents living around the black spots to fix the problem. The next step was to not only cancel the black spots by cleaning them up but also erecting benches and planting trees around them. “I got the area supervisor and health inspector’s name and numbers painted at these spots,” says Anil. His work didn’t end there. He monitored the place with a waste picker for a few days to ensure that it didn’t go back to square one. Once satisfied, he moved on to the next black spot.
When he began his innings, there were 34 black spots. Now, there is just one.”This is garbage brought from other wards and dumped here because the garbage collectors over there are not going to people’s houses and collecting the waste from them. With no option, they are dumping the waste here,” says Anil. “I am sure that one day, even this will be eliminated.”
His work is far from over. Every other day, newer black spots emerge out of nowhere, and mostly on the roadside. “I make sure I kill them before they flourish,” he says.
Such dedication to work has won him many admirers. The Sector 4 and Sector 7 Residents Welfare Association honoured him for his out-of-the-box thinking and sincerity. And so did the Salarpuria Serenity Apartment Owners Association in Sector 7. Not to mention, his felicitation at the recent 10K Freedom Run by Kaagaz Foundation. Keep at it, Anil.
If you have any wet or dry garbage issue, you can call him at 90086-92345 or 95131-40009.
A DAY IN HIS LIFE
Begins his work at 5am and ends at 2pm. On Wednesdays and Saturdays, it can last till 6pm or 8pm as it’s the dry waste collection day for his 240 member team.
