HYDERABAD: If there is one thing common to most colonies in Yousufguda division, it’s that most of them don’t have garbage bins. Every vacant land parcel within this densely-populated locality has been converted to a mini-landfill. Long-time residents of the ward say the area had been considered upscale until recently but the indiscriminate waste dumping and bad roads due to metro rail work has impacted their quality of life. All the four sides of a vacant plot that’s under dispute at Kamalapuri Colony have turned into a makeshift garbage dumping ground. Narayan Raja, who runs Pleasant Point, a fast-food restaurant next to the pile of garbage, has this to say: “The GHMC people themselves dump the garbage at the site and sometimes burn the garbage pile,”.
Burning garbage is a crime in Telangana and could attract a fine of Rs 25,000. “We usually don’t allow people to dump garbage here during the day but people dump garbage here during the night. How can nearby residents eat and live in a place as this that smells foul?” he asks. Residents say the garbage crisis began after a lot of people working in the IT and film industry flocked to Yousufguda for residence, lured by the low rents there. “While the population of the area has increased rapidly in the past five years, civic services have not kept pace with this increase and the GHMC has failed on this count, “ notes Sayed Sadiq, secretary, Kalampuri Colony Welfare Association “The garbage has naturally spawned the mosquito menace.
When the quality of life in an area goes down, it affects everybody,” he adds. “Those of us who stay in villas have the GHMC workers come to our doorstep and collect the waste. As responsible citizens, we even segregate the waste at our home. Those who dump the waste in vacant sites are mostly from the restaurants and poultry shops situated on the main roads,” says Adil Khan, a liaison officer with the state panchayat raj and rural department and resident of Krishna Nagar A Block. “The garbage bins in the ward have completely gone.
The bins we have now are not for the public but for our workers to dump garbage. We are providing autorickshaws and cycle-rickshaws to collectors for door-to-door garbage collection,” says A Ramesh, GHMC deputy commissioner, Yousufguda Circle. “We are conducting surveys and awareness campaigns for the public, requesting them to segregate waste at homes. We have been partly successful in waste segregation at source, that is home,” he adds. Another issue still plaguing the residents is the bad road left behind by metro rail construction work.
“They did some re-carpeting a few weeks ago and they did the same last year around the same time. It just has to rain once for the roads to become unusable,” observes Noumaan Khan, an engineering student and resident of LN Nagar, who had recently taken a joyride on the metro rail. “I am waiting for the metro line through this area to open. I hope that once the metro work is over, the authorities will beautify this locality like they did with the metro corridor,” he says with a twinkle. Yousufguda corporator Sanjay Goud said, “We had removed the bins when people started throwing the garbage around the bins which led to dogs throwing the waste onto to the road.”