Dharavi computer engineer highlights waste dumping at night; BMC blames housing societies

For the last few days, Ataul Khan, a computer engineer, has been tweeting to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) about a heap of garbage in Dharavi’s Azad Nagar. The waste is usually dumped on Jasmine Mill Road at night and it is cleared by the civic body’s solid waste management department (SWMD) in the morning.

Civic officials, however, said housing societies are not informing them of the time when they will have the garbage ready to be collected.

“We are constantly creating awareness to not dump garbage but it still happens. We can schedule the pickup accordingly if the housing societies let us know when the garbage is ready,” an SWMD official said.

He said, “For slums, we have a door-to-door pick-up under the BMC’s Swachh Mumbai Prabodhan Abhiyan [SMPA], which outsources the collection to social institutions from the area. We want to have a collaborative approach and don’t want to go around filing cases against citizens because that will discourage them.”

The SMPA volunteers are also dumping the waste there due to lack of dustbins and notices have been sent to them in this regard, the official added.

Speaking to HT, Khan said Jasmine Mill Road is hardly 20 feet wide and such a large pile of garbage occupies half the space, leading to a traffic jam. “There has to be a permanent solution to this. We cannot allow citizens and SMPA volunteers to dump waste here every day.”

Under the Solid Waste Management rules, 2016, it is the duty of the waste generators (citizens) to segregate the garbage into bio-degradable, non-biodegradable, and domestic hazardous wastes and hand them over to the authorised collectors.