BENGALURU: Despite stringent laws in place against dumping of construction and demolition (C & D) waste, not a single builder in the city has been fined so far.
Roads across the city are strewn with debris — the Outer Ring Road and low-lying areas emerging as main disposal spots.
On the other hand, the only firm in Bengaluru which recycles construction waste is not even getting enough debris to run its plant at half the capacity.
Under the BBMP’s solid waste management by-laws, March 2020, any failure to dispose such waste in a segregated manner or dumping it anywhere will invite a penalty of Rs 10,000 per tonne for a first-time offence and Rs 25,000 per tonne for the second and subsequent offences.
D Randeep, former special Commissioner, BBMP, Solid Waste Management, conceded that no one has been fined yet. “We have been levying fines for SWM violations. However, no one has yet been fined for C&D violations.”
The BBMP has given powers to the assistant engineers in wards and the assistant executive engineer at the divisional level to levy fines for construction projects which do not have documentary proof of tie-up for waste disposal, and also book trucks carrying waste without proof of it heading to the C&D plants, Randeep added.
It has been learnt that C&D waste of anywhere between 4,000 and 5,000 tonnes are generated on an average day with government agencies like BBMP, BMRCL, BDA and Smart City projects accounting for at least 50 per cent of them.
Rajesh Kohar, partner at Rock Crystals, which run the city’s only C&D waste plant at Chikkajajur said, “We can recycle up to 1,000 tonnes of construction waste per day. But we get only a maximum of 400 tonnes per day now. Even this is in the aftermath of an NGT meeting in February this year. Prior to that, we got between 60 and 70 tonnes a day.”