BENGALURU: Residents caught a person dumping an entire furniture set into a pond right beside Benniganahalli lake on Saturday.
Randhir Singh, who lives in an apartment near the lake, saw a vehicle unloading the furniture set and confronted the three people inside it. While two of them did not step out of the vehicle, the third person claimed he was acting as per the orders of a BBMP official. As more residents gathered and started asking him for the official’s contact number, he refused to share the number and walked away.
After about five minutes, the person loaded the furniture back into his vehicle and drove away. The furniture included a three-seater sofa and two single sofa chairs. Singh said, “They initially gave excuses, but when I asked them further questions they took away the furniture.”
Sridhar Kapa, another local resident, said garbage, waste from chicken shops and concrete waste were repeatedly dumped into the lake. He said he often saw a man who would come in a car and dump waste from a chicken shop into the lake and then drive away. “When we caught him two weeks ago, he claimed to know a few politicians. We haven’t seen him since, but I have noticed similar waste matter being dumped at another locations.”
Residents save lake
Kapa said that following constant dumping of waste into the lake, the residents in the area started to monitor the lake. Residents and policemen from Ramamurthynagar Police Station visited chicken shops and instructed them not to dump waste in the lake. They also got in touch with the local BBMP official of the health department. Kapa said the residents were also responsible for cleaning up a park beside the lake. They also got the BBMP to put up a mesh around the lake’s boundary.