At the Pension Office bus stop at Masab Tank, commuters stand holding handkerchiefs to their nose. Some keep their eyes averted from the mountain of garbage and refuse scooped up by an earthmover from the nala and deposited beside the prefab toilet.
“This bus stop is crowded through the day. In the morning, there is no place to stand except here and the smell is ghastly. I will have to walk ahead at least a kilometre if I want to avoid this stench. I keep hoping it will be removed tomorrow, but that tomorrow never comes,” said Pratik Das, who works at a coffee outlet at Begumpet. “This place used to smell foul in summer as the water in the nala dries up. But when they removed the garbage from the nala and put it here to allow water to flow, the smell has become worse. I keep taking frequent breaks, but I have no choice,” says the vendor of ice blocks at the location.
The Masab Tank garbage mountain is not an isolated example. Small hillocks of garbage dot the city at Nacharam, Lalapet, Karwan, L.B. Nagar, Sagar Road, Gachibowli and many other locations where waterlogging incidents have been reported. Sanitary workers of the GHMC removed blockages caused by garbage as an emergency measure and dumped it on the side to be cleared later.
It took GHMC engineers about 30 hours to clear the mess owing to clogged sewerage pipelines near the Biodiversity Junction at Gachibowli on October 2 and 3. A few days before that, the GHMC officials had to use heavy machinery to clear the blocked nala near Lalapet after intense rain in the surrounding areas flooded the road and submersed parts of East Anandbagh Colony. L.B. Nagar and the roads in the surrounding areas too have the mounds of uncleared filth. “The sanitary workers de-silt the nalas and keep the material near the site which they clear after three days when it dries up. But this time, it has been raining on and off and that may be the reason why the accumulated garbage has not been lifted in some areas,” said a GHMC official.
In May this year, a number of GHMC engineers and contractors were named in what came to be called a ‘silt scam’ where officials fudged details about the transport of silt removed during de-silting operations before monsoon. While the officials showed that the silt has been transported, the vehicle details gave away the game as many of the vehicles were two-wheelers.
