Even while the mounting problem of garbage heaps across the City is threatening to break into a health epidemic, the city's apex civic authority is mulling to double the garbage cess from hapless, angry Bengalureans. The degree of mismanagement and callousness is huge with the BBMP now firefighting the garbage problem with no far-sighted plans of solving the issue once and for all - have a power plant to generate thermal power from waste.
It would have been a different story if the Palike had thought through the problem and sanctioned adequate land for commissioning the power plant - part of a 2005 agreement with Ramky Infrastructure Limited, which would have helped in turning the lakhs of tons of garbage into thermal power, to be used, at a premium of course, by the power-starved City. This may have solved two perennial problems of Bengaluru - mounds of solid waste and power shortage, to an extent, at least.
But the BBMP failed to allocate 100 acres of land to Ramky for the power plant citing land dispute in the region. Instead, it gave only 38 acres to the private firm on a 35-year-lease, which is now covered with mountains of over 10 lakh tons of untreated garbage. The landfill, with a capacity of 350 to 300 tons of MSD, was routinely being dumped with over 700 tons of unsegregated waste. The BBMP has to segregate waste before disposing it in the landfill, an obligation they have consistently failed to honour for the last seven years.
The power project, which, according to senior officers in the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board, is the only solution to scientifically dispose MSD, has till date remained on paper. A Rs 10-12 crore project, which would have generated 12MW of power from every 1,000 tons of MSD, to be set up by Ramky, was proposed by the Karnataka Renewable Energy Development Limited to the government. The government asked them to get a clearance from BBMP, which never happened. The civic authority finally cleared the project in the last Council meeting.
"The generation cost would have been between Rs 7 to 8 per unit. In the last Council meeting, they approved the project and asked Ramky to give a commitment," said an official source. Even as the government agencies fire fight the issue, will Bengalureans do their bit and segregate garbage they generate each day?