The Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) on Friday told the Karnataka High Court that it would, in a phased manner, do away with the present system of deploying its pourakarmikas for garbage collection and sweeping of streets within the areas that have been entrusted to private garbage contractors.
The BBMP gave this assurance to a Division Bench comprising Justice N. Kumar and Justice B.V. Nagarathna during the hearing of public interest litigation petitions related to city’s garbage problem.
BBMP counsel K.N. Putte Gowda, taking instruction of Commissioner M. Lakshminarayan, told the court that, to begin with, the BBMP would start with six of the 41 garbage packages for which bids were floated recently and deploy its pourakarmikas.
During the hearing, the Bench questioned why the BBMP was deploying its pourakarmikas in certain areas within the localities awarded to private contractors for garbage clearance. The Bench found that such a mixed functioning of BBMP’s pourakarmikas and those employed by the private contractors is one of the root causes for the garbage clearance problem.
The BBMP should earmark some of the garbage packages for itself where only pourakarmikas employed by the palike should be working, the court orally directed the BBMP Commissioner.
New mechanism
Meanwhile, the BBMP told the Bench that it would within a month terminate all the old contracts, who had been asked to continue their service till new tenders are finalised, and would deploy new contractors by evolving a new mechanism.
This submission was made after the court questioned how the BBMP was continuing the service of old contractors in 41 packages even though their contracts were expired long ago. “As long as these old contractors are inside, they will never allow the problem to be solved…”, the Bench observed.
The Bench decided to continue the hearing on October 11 while stating that it required to study the report submitted by the BBMP-appointed expert committee recommending ways and means for effective disposal of garbage.
