Articles by Lalitha Rani Mondreti

This video captures a common everyday scene which every Bengalurean is now accustomed to seeing - the sight of broken pushcarts overflowing with household waste being pushed with difficulty, the sight of huge mounds of rotting garbage lying on the ground. The heartrending sight of workers bending over ankle-deep in rotten stinky waste and laboriously filling up a large compactor vehicle with small shovels and baskets manually, while the compactor system is meant to be filled up by a mechanical operation, directly from tippers to compactors. This is the pitiable state of our waste workers functioning in a broken system…

A screenshot of the Mandur countdown timer as on September 4th, 10:20 am. Less than 57 days for the Mandur landfill to shut down. The government seems to have no visible plan as to how to handle the piles of garbage that will still need to go somewhere. The people supposed to be on top of the situation are still waiting for the system to evolve, by when we will probably see the evolution of a new species from tons of rotting garbage! India does not have excess of space for landfills like the US or some other countries. Landfills…