New garbage contracts smell of foul play

New garbage contracts smell of foul play
New Indian Express

BANGALORE: Even as the new garbage contracts await government approval, the terms of the contract have contradictory ‘terms’, which the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BMP) seems to have overlooked.

Twenty of the thirty packages of the new contracts have been assigned to Mavallipura landfill as disposal site but the BMP has not yet completed works on the landfill despite Supreme Court order. The civic body seems to be in hurry to put the cart before the horse.

These twenty packages account for about 6 lakh households and about 60 per cent of 2005 metric tonnes of waste generated every day. The government approval of BMP proposal may only serve the contractors not citizen, as the garbage has nowhere to go.

What is more interesting is that the terms of agreement of the contract specify that if the contractor dumps the waste in any site other than the designated place, he would be imposed a penalty of 100 percent of service charge.

Clause 8.3 also says that BMP can terminate the agreement for any default of the contractor. But BMP has sanctioned the contracts at double the existing cost without looking into practicability.

Apart from the households, the contractors are also expected to clean the commercial establishments everyday; about 90,000 in number along with roads, burial grounds, vacant sites and BMP buildings.

Only other disposal site designated by the civic body is the one operated by Karnataka Compost Development Corporation (KCDC), which would be used by 10 packages generating about 800 tonnes per day. However, the KCDC has no facilities to handle such huge volumes.

While BMP sources say that Mavallipura landfill would be operational by December, they have no arrangements to dump the waste till then but the civic body is in a hurry to get the new contracts approved at a cost of Rs 90 crore a year.

BMP Commissioner K Jairaj maintained that he would go by the government’s decision. “The proposal was approved by the Council and the urban development department has forwarded it to the CM,” he said.