Starting 9 am on Friday, the residents of Mavallipura will begin a second day of protests to prevent the BBMP contracted private trucks from making another attempt to dump garbage in the open landfill on their land. Late on Wednesday night and again on Thursday morning, trucks contracted by the civic body, piled high with garbage trundled along the Dodaballapur Road headed for Mavallipura but were thwarted by villagers, determined to stop the BBMP from re-opening the landfill.
The 38-acre garbage dump, home to strays and child rag-pickers was shut a month ago following an order from the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board after it began to pose a health hazard. Tensions ran high on Thursday with 500 police personnel deployed to reopen the landfill, coming up against angry villagers after Home minister Ashok asked KSPCB to reopen the dumpyard. Meanwhile, farmer Srinivasa, 42, reportedly died of cardiac arrest as police arrived.
BBMP, why dump when you can light up city!
Who is at fault here? Why is the issue of clearing and disposing of garbage at a complete standstill? As heaps of garbage, collect at every corner of the city and get ever larger, the finger-pointing has begun. Who is to blame? The private group tasked with garbage removal? Or the civic body, the BBMP, accused by the private company, Ramky Infrastructure Limited, a corporate firm hired to dispose waste, of not adhering to the terms of the contract.
Specifically, Ramky had asked for 100 acres of land, to build a power plant that would use solid waste to generate power instead of dumping the lakhs of tonnes of untreated garbage into an open landfill, with all the attendant health hazards that it poses to the lives of thousands of villagers in the city’s outskirts.