Bengaluru’s garbage problems would have been a lot worse had it not been for a small, but dedicated army of women who have taken up cudgels on behalf of citizens to bring in more accountability in the waste management system. Some of the landmark decisions, such as rejecting landfills, have been the result of a relentless battle waged by these women, who often took legal recourse to make the BBMP ‘see reason’.
It started in the mid 1990s with Almitra Patel, the first Indian woman engineer to graduate from MIT, moving the courts in her fight against landfills. Her 1996 PIL in the Supreme Court against landfills led to the first set of rules for municipal solid waste management in the country. Eighty-one but indomitable as ever, she is now busy helping various city administrations handle waste.
Ms. Patel’s work was closely followed by Kalpana Kar, an entrepreneur and member of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force in 2001. She launched the first-ever Swacha Bangalore drive, removed all bins from the city and got the administration to introduce door-to-door collection of waste, the first crack at segregation.
Then came Nalini Shekhar, who has integrated over 7,000 rag pickers into the waste processing industry. Due to her efforts, today each ward has a Dry Waste Collection Centre, mostly run by waste pickers.
In 2009, many of these women came together to form the Solid Waste Management Round Table. A visit to their website will prove the hypothesis: there are hardly any men working in the space.
N.S. Ramakanth, a tireless septuagenarian, is probably the only exception in the team, which included filmmaker Priya Ramasubban and techie Archana Kashyap, that standardised segregation at source by introducing the 2Bin1Bag policy. They approached the High Court, which in 2015 made it mandatory across the city.
There are many others: Vani Murthy of Swacha Graha evangelising for composting at house, Kavita Reddy running Hasiru Mitra, gynaecologist Dr. Meenakshi Barath, stock broker turned activist Sandhya Naraynan and neighbourhood warriors, including Lalitha Modretti in Bellandur, Sneha Nandihal in Indira Nagar, Anu Govind in Whitefield. And, the list goes on.
But is waste management a job only for women? Sadly for now, ‘yes’.
Ms. Kar said generation of waste is usually associated with the kitchen in a household, and hence with women. “Waste management is yet to be seen as a profitable industry, which is when men enter the arena. Cleanliness of the house or the city is what women are more concerned about, than men,” she said, adding that once the potential of the industry is realised, it is unlikely to remain a women-only space.
Ms. Patel reasoned that women were better equipped to convince households, housemaids and pourakarmikas to handle waste better. “It’s a sort of sisterhood that forms and this is the best way to bring about a behavioural change,” Ms. Kar said.
To many, these women may seem pushy and uncompromising, but it is these very qualities that has turned them into role models. But for them, the city would not have known what to do with the waste it generates.
