Morning after Open Street: M.G. Road strewn with garbage

A carnival-like atmosphere at the traffic-free M.G. Road Open Street, on Sunday ensured that a wave of humanity descended on the 700-metre stretch, bringing along with it mounds of garbage comprising mostly plastic.

The morning after saw the civic body cleaning up the road before the onslaught of Monday morning traffic.

With over a lakh footfalls, organisers — the Directorate of Urban Land Transport (DULT) and other government agencies including the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) — were overwhelmed. Garbage bins near food stalls were overflowing by Sunday evening spilling over to the street.

“The littering happened mostly because the number of people who attended were far more than our estimates and the garbage bins installed fell short. We are unhappy at the way the street became dirty so quickly. The waste should have been managed better. In fact, this was our only grouse with the whole event, which was otherwise organised efficiently,” said DULT Commissioner V. Manjula, adding that there will be better arrangements made for the next Open Street to be held in B.T.M. Layout.

On a regular day, the BBMP collects close to 1 tonne of mixed waste, but on Monday morning they collected two tonnes of only dry waste.

“We collected around two tonnes of waste by early morning Thursday, and almost all of it was dry waste comprising plastic. The thing about plastic waste is that even though the quantity is huge, it is light and thereby the weight of the waste cannot be the real measure of exactly how much garbage there actually was,” said Sri Rangaswamy, East Zone Superintending Engineer, Solid Waste Management, BBMP, adding that the event managers had seen to it that the wet waste had been taken care of by a private organisation.

“ We have certain guidelines on managing waste during such big events; however we need to make renewed efforts to enforce it… so that there is no repetition of this,” said BBMP Commissioner Kumar Naik.

However, N.S. Ramakanth, waste management expert and member of the Solid Waste Management Round Table, a citizens group that advices the BBMP on how to manage waste, said managing waste at this scale was really not that difficult. “When so much money was being spent, some extra money could have been spent on volunteers to make sure that waste was being segregated and put into bins. They could have hired some voluntary organisations to help out and there would have been no such problem for citizens,” he said.