‘Where is Swachh Bharat in city’, question residents

Ludhiana: With the increase of garbage in the city, ‘safai karamcharis have been charging heftily to collect garbage. The city has become one of the cities with the dirtiest streets in the state over a period of time, where streets are being freely littered by its residents. Increase in population has led to increase in domestic waste and its collection.However, this has also provided jobs to poorer people to collect domestic waste to earn a living, but over a period of time, the charges for the same have increased, varying from area to area — Rs110 in Dugri, Rs100 in Kitchlu Nagar, Rs80 in Sarabha Nagar Extension, Rs90 in Manakwal, and Rs70 for Civil City.
Civil City resident Bani Sharma said: “Garbage collectors are charging heftily from us. We assume they are segregating waste, but the city has become dirtier than before. In fact, there is no uniformity in paying for the same job, even in adjacent areas of the city. For a three-day week job, charges are uneven, and not all garbage collectors go to dumping areas, as some of them just burn it or dump it into some river stream, causing more pollution.”
The issue is persistent in some peri-urban areas, which are still under development. People dump waste in nearby empty plots. Haibowal Kalan, adjacent to Buddah Nullah, is mostly hit with littered streets, as people dump garbage and cattle waste nearby. Rishi Verma, another resident of Joshi Nagar in Haibowal Kalan, said: “The first step taken by the BJP government after it came power in 2014 was ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan’, and such a dirty picture of the city now makes most people believe that the Abhiyaan was just a 5-year plan, because the condition of the streets has not changed at all, and even the streets of other cities in Punjab are generally dirty. Commuters, vendors, and fruit-sellers throw waste on the streets every day.”
The city’s residents are now demanding that the garbage collector charge the same amount of money from every house, and not fix different rates for different areas. Talking about the ill-effects of dumping waste haphazardly, environmentalist Brij Mohan from Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) said: “Waste management is required in every way of garbage disposal, because if we burn the waste, it pollutes the air, if we dump it on land, it pollutes the soil, and if we dump it into sewage, it pollutes river bodies. So, any way of disposing waste is polluting nature.”
Suggesting recycling of items, like in the case of waste paper, in order to preserve the balance of nature, he also said: “Discarding non-biodegradable materials, like burning them leads to release of methane, which is more harmful than other gases that cause global warming. The city must be equipped with proper cleaning and disposal of waste.”
Mayor Balkar Singh Sandhu said: “Earlier, Ludhiana city used to produce 800-900 tonnes on a daily basis, which has now increased manifold to 1,100 tonnes. The cost which contractors charge varies from area to area. They generally charge less from economically weaker areas and more than Rs100 from posh areas. The amount is being distributed among garbage collectors. Besides this, we are educating people about waste segregation through a drive, to keep the plastic in one bag and put other items like leaves and vegetables in parks, so that they become manure.”