Karnataka - Bangalore   

Residents join hands to add value to waste

Bangalore: Even as the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is struggling to manage the solid waste generated in the city, the Kalyananagar Residents’ Welfare Association (KRWA) has completed a decade of door-to-door garbage collection and producing organic manure locally.

All this began in 1998 with the formation of Kalyananagar Waste Management Committee (KWMC) by the KRWA in association with the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).

It started as an attempt to keep the locality clean through community participation. The KWMC today covers over 3,000 houses of HRBR Layout 1st Block and parts of 2nd and 3rd Blocks.

The KWMC has employed 30 personnel for the door-to-door garbage collection using 15 tricycles. After bringing the waste to the old BDA ward office — where the committee has set up a natural compost unit — the personnel segregate the waste into degradable and non-degradable. While the degradable waste is dumped into the compost pit, the non-degradable waste is handed over to the civic authorities for scientific disposal.

First, the waste is decomposed naturally in a period spread over three to four weeks and then the manure is filtered and sieved. While the fine mixture is sold as raw manure at Rs. 5 a kg to the residents, the remaining portion is further decomposed using earthworms and the manure thus produced is sold to the residents at Rs. 10 a kg, according to KRWA coordinator D.S. Rajshekar.

At present, the committee is collecting about five tonnes of waste from houses and producing approximately producing about 75 kg of organic manure for a tonne of waste, he pointed out.

As part of the 10th anniversary of KWMC, the association on Saturday made a new beginning in waste disposal. Now, the KWMC will hand over the non-degradable waste, like plastic, to the ITC which will recycle it at its treatment plants.

The BDA and the Norad supported the KWMC for the first couple of years. Now the KWMC, led by its president Dr. Rohini and team, is not depending on any external agency and is managing the works by collecting Rs. 15 from each house as fee.

This “clean” initiative has attracted organisations from abroad – like National Environment Management Authority from Uganda, delegations from the World Bank and United Nations.

However, the active members of KWMC are not happy for one reason — of not being able to involve all the residents.

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