BENGALURU: Noting that Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is required to act a little more and come out with an ‘Out of the Box’ approach, the Karnataka High Court on Monday, said that the penalty imposed on the violators of Solid Waste Management Rules in the city is too meagre to work as a deterrence measure and hence the BBMP may also consider initiating penal action against the violators taking recourse to appropriate provisions to IPC as an additional measure.
A division bench of Chief Justice Prasanna B Varale and Justice Krishna S Dixit passed the order after going through the response filed by the BBMP stating that it has levied a penalty of Rs 11.66 crores between September 2019 to August 2023 from violators, in response to the directions issued by the court on a batch of PILs filed in 2012.
“In our opinion, if the total amount of penalty collected by the BBMP from violators is seen, it can safely be said that the penalty is too meagre to work as a deterrence measure... The stakeholders BBMP and the state government are required to consider this aspect afresh. It may not be out of place to state here that merely imposing a penalty may not serve the purpose in all the cases."
“They require an additional measure by way of deterrence so that the violators may not commit violation repeatedly or act casually considering the meagre amount of penalty,” the court said.
The court also said that BBMP may also take steps to implement the user fee collection system for solid waste management as early as possible, as there is no pre-requisite to obtaining permission from the government to introduce the said system.
The court also said that the citizens are also required to act dutifully by following the provisions of the rules.