A public interest litigation (PIL) petition in the Karnataka High Court has sought a direction to the Gulbarga City Corporation (GCC) to utilise funds sanctioned for disposal of 170 tonnes of solid waste generated in the city on a daily basis so as to keep the city clean.
Sharan Desai, U.S.-returned software engineer, has made the Commissioner of the Gulbarga City Corporation and the Deputy Commissioner as the respondents in the PIL.
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The public interest litigation states that the State government provided Rs. 2.07 crore to the Gulbarga City Corporation for solid-waste management.
The PIL alleged that the corporation had not utilised the funds judiciously. The petitioner contested the claim of the corporation that 558 garbage containers have been installed in 55 wards in Gulbarga.
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Mr. Desai said in his PIL that garbage was not being cleared on a daily basis. In the response he got from the Gulbarga City Corporation to his RTI application, he said that the GCC had said that the funds sanctioned were not being used, and that garbage was not being cleared on a daily basis.
And, the garbage collected is burned by the personnel in-charge of shifting the garbage to landfill sites, thus increasing pollution levels. The garbage landfill site at Udanoor village would be hardly sufficient to dump the entire garbage collected from the 558 garbage containers every day. Mr. Desai also questioned the claim that Rs. 26.24 lakh was being spent to create awareness among people with the help of two NGOs.
He said people in Gulbarga did not know of any such awareness programme taken up by the NGOs or the city corporation.
Mr. Desai urged the court to direct the Gulbarga City Corporation to take up recycling of solid waste generated in Gulbarga.
Vacancies
The State government should also be directed to fill all vacant posts in the city corporation and post senior IAS officer Harsh Gupta, who changed the face of Bidar city when he was its Deputy Commissioner, as the Regional Commissioner to monitor the orderly development of Gulbarga to enable investors from other States and abroad to establish their industries in the district.