Garden City moniker buried in mounds of debris, garbage

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: The soil of the city is crying that it is not able to keep up with the escalating population of Bengaluru.

Gigantic pieces of scrap metal to micro-plastics are dumped in the soil, choking it and making it worse than the last time, which was not the case before, as many old timers recall. Bengaluru was once known as a Green City and is now slowly becoming a city mounted on garbage and ill - planned infrastructure. The debris dumping issue has become the bane of "Silicon City".

With many new buildings and civic maintenance works continuing to drag, the pain of soil pollution and other environmental hazards, the city is open to is poisioning it. Many residents across various parts of Bengaluru have gotten this construction debris cleared with the help of civic bodies and sometimes with private investments but there seems to be no end or regulation to stop offenders from continuing this act of making any open land a dumping ground.

Nisha Vishwanath, a resident of Vajrahalli said, “The civic body has constructed new roads in the residential area. They removed the tar of the previous road and replaced it with a fresh layer. The commute is easier no doubt, but the amount of debris that has piled up in the locality is "impossible". "We even got it cleaned once but since there are no cameras in the area, we are unable to track who these offenders are,” he said.

A social activist who was investigating such types of dumplings in her residential area said that most of the illegal dumping takes place at night time, mostly around midnight and very few areas are under CCTV watch, which makes it harder to track these people. They also tend to find loopholes to this if they are ever stopped. Nodal officers of many wards have not bothered to look into the matter, which is the gist of all pending matters that the civic body fails to address.

Vijay Nishant, better known as the Tree Doctor said, "The soil quality of Bengaluru has depleted quite a bit from the time I was a child. It is now mixed with unprocessed garbage. Materials like glass, metal sheets, cement blocks, plastic, and biological and radiological waste is thrown and burnt together, which is not only illegal but also a major health hazard.”

He adds that this is the major reason why the fertility of the soil has gone down and farmers have to resort to synthetic measures to produce enough food for the growing city. Simple measures like  a designated dumping ground with a wellequipped segregation unit should be established by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, alongside the installation of more CCTV cameras with the help of law-enforcement agencies and fines should be higher for such offences.

The civic body said that the matter will be solved once the maintenance work is done but no promises of actually fixing it were made, which leaves the citizens with little hope for improvement.