garbage

The big money plans for waste treatment remain on paper. But a small community-oriented scheme for waste treatment, which was a small part of that big plan, is showing promise. Trash to cash is not just a cliché for this diverse group of poor women in Shillong. Earning a livelihood as waste pickers earlier, these women have banded together as a self-help group to sift and convert bio degradable waste dumped at a nearby landfill into saleable compost. Shillong, as most of Meghalaya today, faces an ugly garbage crisis that threatens to wipe out her claim as the queen of…

A month after it launched the Adopt-a-Street initiative, BBMP has received 35 applications. “Of these, around 17 applications from various RWAs and corporate companies are serious. They are willing to sign an MoU with us and take the initiative forward,” says Randeep Dev, BBMP Additional Commissioner (Solid Waste Management). Adopt-a-Street is a voluntary service initiative under which citizens and corporate houses can adopt specific streets, and maintain them regularly to ensure visual cleanliness. Launched on August 25th, the programme is supported by The Ugly Indian (TUI), an anonymous group of volunteers working for cleaner streets. Dev says BBMP will shortlist…

On the face of it all, the Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) could not care less, even though the city is union defence minister Rajnath Singh’s constituency. The cleanliness survey conducted earlier this year by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) ranked Lucknow as one of the dirtiest cities in the country. The city’s ranking dropped to 121, from 115 last year. Despite having an army of 9350 sanitation workers, 6281 of them on contract, and showing an increase in monthly petrol consumption of 1.5 lakh litres for transporting solid waste, the municipal corporation has fared poorly in…

  Ward delimitation before civic polls State government has taken up the delimitation of wards based on a proposal by the BBMP (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike), in the run up to the civic polls in 2020. After delimitation, the number of wards will remain the same, but the core city will have fewer wards compared to the outer zones. The goal is to reduce the disparity in ward population, which ranges from 21,171 in Marenahalli to 95,368 in Horamavu. The plan now is to have 198 wards with an average population of 42,645. The exercise will be done on the…

Kanika*, a 15-year-old girl, carries her two-year-old sister Alisha in her arms. The portions of her hands and arms visible outside her half-sleeved magenta kurta are full of abrasions. “I’ve shown it to the doctor many times and he’s given me medicine but it remains itchy,” she says. She attributes the itchiness to the purportedly contaminated water in her home of one and a half years, in Anand Parbat transit camp. Her move to this central Delhi neighbourhood -- five kilometres from her former home – was forced and put her out of school, Kanika recalls. “Alisha was an infant…

The largest city of Rajasthan is the capital, 'pink city' Jaipur. Number 7 among the 25 parliamentary constituencies of the state, Jaipur is all set to go to polls on May 6th. Jaipur parliamentary constituency comprises eight assembly constituencies: Hawa Mahal, Vidhyadhar Nagar, Civil Lines, Kishan Pole, Adarsh Nagar, Malviya Nagar, Sanganer and Bagru. Jaipur is seen to be a BJP bastion, with the Congress winning this seat just thrice in the last 16 polls, since 1952. The BJP won the seat eight times. In 2014, the city had 19,57,820 electors, of which 1,047,468 were male and 910,350 were female.…

Two retired bureaucrats -- IAS and former commissioner of Bhubaneswar Municipality Corporation (BMC) Aparajita Sarangi (BJP) and retired IPS officer and former Mumbai Police Commissioner Arup Mohan Patnaik (BJD) -- along with Janardan Pati, the CPI (M) candidate supported by Indian National Congress (INC) were among the 13, mostly fresh, faces in the MP elections in Bhubaneswar. The city voted on April 23rd to elect both MLAs for the Odisha Vidhan Sabha and MPs to the 17th Lok Sabha. However, the primary legislative role of an MP notwithstanding, many voters in the Odisha capital, are still looking at their elected…

Manasi Dighe (name changed) rises before the sun, changes into a sari, plaits her thinning hair, and sets out. At the crack of dawn, her eyes begin searching the road, hoping to find plastic, metal or glass items which, at ₹20 a kilo, could earn her ₹100 in a day. Manasi covers 20 to 30 kilometres daily, when barely a kilometre from her Bhim Nagar hut in Mankhurd, an eastern suburb of Mumbai, is Asia’s largest dumping ground—the Deonar landfill. Mumbai’s 12.4 million citizens send 9000 metric tonnes of waste to this 134-hectare dumping ground every day. If one corner…

The call for a ‘Swachh Bharat’ irritates me, because my city is far from being clean. Bengaluru, my charming garden city, is being destroyed every day. Of course, the burgeoning population could be the primary cause, but what is happening to the civic sense of the citizens? What role do the civic authorities play? Most main roads are dug up for construction of flyovers, metro rail or some road widening project. Don’t even ask about the roads within residential areas. Beautiful bungalows are mindlessly demolished to build apartments with a minimum of four storeys (with one more illegal storey, of…

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) had on January 21st released new tenders for Solid Waste Management( SWM) in Bengaluru city. However, the tender faced criticism from different quarters including several BBMP Corporators, Members of Legislative Assembly (MLA) and BBMP Contractors. As a result a committee was been constituted to study the tender and recommend changes, and the committee has now decided to go ahead with no changes in the tender. What does the new tender say ?  The new tender calls for proposals in all 198 BBMP wards for daily "Primary door-to-door collection and transportation of segregated wet waste,…