Bangalore: Metropolitan India yearns to project a global face but it is hardly able to provide basic amenities to its citizens. Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, stands out as a classic example of the country’s shoddy urban infrastructure. Corruption in public services and scams involving private contractors across other big cities such as New Delhi and Ahmedabad only reinforce the trend.
Earlier this month, the Bangalore municipal corporation, or Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), uncovered a garbage scam wherein garbage contractors in connivance with health and medical officials had funnelled out Rs60 crore by neglecting to clean the city’s streets and producing fake bills.
Reeling under: Garbage being dumped on the outskirts of Bangalore by municipal corporation workers. Hemant Mishra / Mint
Private contractors are irregular in collecting garbage and Bangalore’s street corners and vacant plots of land are at their stinking worst with mounds of rotting garbage. While some residents’ associations are determined to have their voices heard, green bodies point fingers at private contractors and warn of rat fever spreading in the city.
This is yet another instance of how India’s Silicon Valley is struggling with its poor infrastructure and sanitation and apathetic governance. Waste management experts say only awareness among citizens and monitoring of private contractors can set things right in India’s technology capital.
Every monsoon the city’s drains overflow and mix with uncollected and untreated garbage. As a result the state-run Epidemics Disease Hospital overflows with cases of leptospirosis, amoebiasis and infectious hepatitis. “Every year there will be so many cases that there won’t be enough place to put beds,” said a doctor at the specialist hospital with 120 beds.
The frequency at which garbage scams occur increase as India’s garbage grows at an estimated 5% year-on-year. Across Indian cities, scams surface, enquiries follow and the well-oiled nexus between corporators and contractors continues. “Garbage is a mafia type of business… There are lots of irregularities,” opines Amiya Kumar Sahu, president of Mumbai-based, National Solid Waste Association of India, a partly government funded, in the field of solid waste management.
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In October, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation unearthed a garbage scam at the Pirana landfill site where private contrators were dumping mud and stones in place of garbage and claiming payments for the entire weight dumped in the landfill. Mumbai and New Delhi also time to time sees cases of real botched job and municipal corporation employees siphoning diesel from the garbage collection vehicles, while streets in smaller cities like Kochi and Patna are piled with uncleared garbage.