The city’s solid waste management may go back to garbage contractors. The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) council, on Saturday, passed a unanimous resolution to float tenders for solid waste management in the city.
Cutting across party lines, councillors favoured garbage contractors to manage the city’s waste — from doorstep to destination (processing units/landfills), and the council has directed officials to table a draft of the new tender with simplified norms on July 12. The earlier garbage tender with “stringent norms” failed to elicit response thrice.
Solid waste management activists have come down heavily on the move, arguing that this essentially sets back the clock of reforms in the sector by two years and promotes non-segregation of waste at source.
The State government had supported the BBMP’s move to weed out contractors in 2017, and the first step in this direction was starting direct payment to pourakarmikas.
The BBMP is now in the process of augmenting its vehicle infrastructure — compactors and autorickshaws. Currently, the BBMP is dependent on contractors for collecting and transporting waste to the designated locations. The civic body had to deal with a flash strike by contractors against the move to install RFID chips in compactors and GPS systems in autorickshaws. This was after the BBMP found bogus billing for vehicles.
“Given the context, it is telling how councillors batted for the return of contractor raj. We have already given up segregation at source and have been dumping mixed waste, wasting the processing plant infrastructure, and setting the reforms clock partially back. Now, bringing back the contractors will undo all the work done over the last over two years,” said N.S. Ramakanth, member of BBMP’s SWM Expert Committee.
BBMP Commissioner N. Manjunath Prasad said the civic body would continue to augment its vehicle infrastructure. “We will deploy all resources, even those we are about to acquire for waste management. We will call for tenders for only the reminder needs, with norms that enable realtime tracking,” he said.
Stay order
Sources, however, said a garbage contractor recently got a stay order from the High Court of Karnataka on the BBMP’s tender to buy 500 autorickshaws, putting a roadblock in the civic body’s efforts to become self-reliant. There are writ petitions challenging the procurement of 34 mechanical sweepers as well. “This makes it evident that the contractors want to make a comeback and the recent move by the council is to support this,” said a civic official on condition of anonymity.
Sandya Narayanan of the SWM Round Table said going back to uniform tenders would ruin the decentralisation strategy for waste management in the city, as it would incentivise long-distance movement of waste. “The city would be better off with the BBMP entering into an MoU with a vehicle manufacturing firm to lease the vehicles required and take up the operations on its own,” she said. Senior civic officials said there had been attempts in this regard and that a few manufacturers had shown interest.
