Sunday, June 12, 2011

Garbage Collection in Bangalore

When we were living in a hotel, I saw a kind of large rickshaw-like vehicle gathering the garbage. I assumed they were like the paper boy that I saw on the street, meaning on-demand service guys that you have to call up individually.

After moving into our house, I didn't know what to do with the garbage. I didn't want to leave it randomly on the street, but didn't want to keep it in our house either (believe me with the heat we have here, it produces very bad odor in a very short period of time). So, I ended up leaving the garbage in our driveway for a couple of days until I figured out how to get rid of them. On Monday, I asked our driver if he knew the best way to take care of our garbage, and he told me that we can simply leave it outside of our house on the street and that a garbage car will come and pick it up every morning.

Really?! I asked him whether we needed to pay money for the service, and he said "no, ma-am, it is BBMP, the government garbage car, that comes and collects the garbage every morning."

I never expected to hear the "government" word associated with the garbage. Apparently the rickshaw-like vehicle I saw in front of our hotel was a BBMP vehicle. Shocking, but I was also pleased to find that the government was trying to do something to build up the infrastructure to solve the garbage problem, since that's the first thing you would notice here in India. Basically you see garbage ALL OVER the place in this town (and probably in other towns in India as well).

Ever since then, every morning someone has been taking our garbage. Thanks garbageman! However, as I was doing some research on BBMP, I found this article. It seems like there is huge room for improvement at BBMP. 

2 comments:

  1. that's incredible! I have been doing some research on BBMP myself and found some articles online about BBMP plans for door-to-door garbage collection. But until I read your post, I didn't believe it is really working. I am facing the same problem as you faced when you moved into your house. Don't know what to do with the garbage, and I can't just throw it out in the open to rot like everyone else. I am not sure whether I can leave it in our driveway (because in my case, the driveway itself does not exist as of now). Which area of Bangalore are you in? I am in Marathahalli.

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  2. The best way to figure that out is to ask your neighbors. We made a big mistake on the first attempt by leaving our garbage outside of our gate at night, and guess what happened over night? Dogs attacked the garbage and spread it all over our next door neighbor's front gate. We then realized that we had to leave it inside the gate and in the morning. Ever since then, it seems to be working fine.

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