Tossing the problem back

Bengaluru's waste management bureaucracy scored a spectacular success by returning to about 200 houses the waste that their occupants had reportedly dumped in public places.

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The 'waste dumping festival, as Bengaluru Solid Waste Management Limited (BSWML) called its awareness-building campaign, is trying to tell residents that waste is one's own problem, not someone else's. Videos of vehicles tipping the mixed trash back in front of houses may send out the message effectively, but the next act in this play is bound to put reverse pressure on the official system: residents complaining that their trash is all sorted but has nowhere to go. Karnataka's capital, also the country's top information technology metropolis, faces the conundrum of growing consumption-and therefore waste generation-and the lack of systems at scale to manage it sustainably. With a daily volume of the order of 5,000 tonnes, the city struggles to collect all of its waste in segregated form and then to transfer it to designated centres for processing. Last