Belagavi city: smart or dumb

It is several years since Belagavi was selected to become a smart city but in reality, it seems to be becoming dumber by the day. Indore city has become the cleanest city in India in a few years all due to the right decision s of the mayor s and commissioner s mainly because of segregation of waste which is picked from door to door and further processed to get value from segregated garbage.

Indore, Madhya Pradesh: Every morning, garbage vans across Indore play the celebratory song, “Indore hua hai number one (Indore has become number one),” sung by Bollywood singer Shaan in 2017, when Indore was ranked first of 471 towns and cities on the government’s Swachhata Sarvekshan (cleanliness survey ) rankings.

“Every day the garbage van makes its way from one end of the street to another methodically, and everyone comes out to give their trash when they hear the song,” said Malti Kanojia, 52, living in Amar Tekri in Indore. ‘Of course all of us separate ‘gila’ (wet) and ‘sukha’ (dry) waste.”

Since 2016, Indore’s municipal corporation (IMC) has eliminated garbage dumps, ensured 100% household-waste segregation and converted waste to usable products, such as compost and fuel. It partnered with nongovernmental organizations for an awareness campaign to change the behavior of its citizens, contracted private companies to run some waste management operations, used technology, and improved municipal capacity to ensure the implementation of its waste management plan.

All developed countries allow plastic bags to be used liberally, however, garbage is segregated at source and processed accordingly by municipal corporations very effectively by collecting garbage periodically from the doorstep. In fact, Singapore burns plastic to produce energy and the ash is submerged in water pools where fishes live along with corals etc very healthily.

The National Highways Authority of India is currently scaling up his technology to use plastic waste in making roads.

He came up with the idea of mixing plastic waste with Bitumen used for constructing roads in 2001. “That year the Tamil Nadu government had planned to ban plastic and my concern began with the more than 1 lakh people employed by the industry. Since plastic is derived from petroleum just like Bitumen, I thought of using it for road construction. The result, not only plastic waste was getting utilized, the roads were cheaper and steadier,” he said. The plastic waste does not have to be segregated and even multi-layered plastics can be used in the mix. “All we need to do is collect the waste, dry it out and use it,” he said.

The construction of every kilometre of road required nine tonnes of Bitumen and one tonne of plastic waste. This means for every kilometre of road, one-tonne Bitumen is saved, which costs about ₹30,000.

White topping of roads is taking several years to finish thereby creating a lot of inconvenience and accidents etc example s are Mandoli road, KPTCL road i.e Shakti Marg in Nehru Nagar Belagavi. Businesses which are already in trouble because of government policies are facing unprecedented problems because of the lopsided work s taken up to make city smarter like roads at Nehru Nagar wherein the buses have been banned from entering where all office s of bus operators are located

White topped roads offer greater resistance to vehicle tyres thereby decreasing the efficiency of fuel consumption and increasing wear and tear of tyres thereby decreasing the life span considerably.