How relentless officials put garbage mafia on the back foot

BENGALURU: Thursday’s raid on the BBMP’s Bommanahalli zone office by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) is a crucial step in the persistent efforts made by solid waste management (SWM) officials to bust the garbage mafia by breaking the nexus between officials and contractors.
Talk of garbage mafia ruling the roost in Bengaluru had been in the air for long, but the scam had largely remained an abstract concept in the absence of concrete action to unravel it. But one and a half years of relentless pursuit by SWM officials, led by joint commissioner Sarfaraz Khan, finally yielded results when the ACB raided the Bommanahalli zone office to get to the bottom of a Rs 550crore scam — fake bills raised towards 6,600 non-existent pourakarmikas and a Rs 384crore scandal in the diversion of ESI, PF and transportation funds meant for the civic workers.

Blowing the whistle on the garbage mafia, Khan, a Karnataka cooperation services officer on deputation to the BBMP as joint commissioner for health and solid waste management for three years, submitted a report to BBMP commissioner N Manjunatha Prasad on how the racket operated. Acting on Khan’s report, Prasad complained to the ACB after getting a nod from urban development department in August 19, 2017.

Khan said he took several months to unravel the nexus between garbage contractors and a few officials. “I was deputed in Yelahanka zone as the zonal joint commissioner and was handling 11 wards. I used to be on the field every morning to check pourakarmikas’ attendance and noticed a variation in the numbers as claimed in the bills. The same exercise was conducted after I was elevated to BBMP’s head office to look after the entire city’s solid waste management,” he said.

As the first step to streamline things, BBMP made biometric attendance mandatory for pourakarmikas. “We asked contractors to bring all their auto-tippers and compactors under GPS. These measures were enough to unearth the irregularities in garbage management,” Khan told TOI.

BBMP bosses got the biggest shock when they found that PF and ESI funds were not deposited in pourakarmikas’ accounts. “As a resident too I know which pourakarmika is sweeping the street in front of my house and when I found her details not matching with the ESI and PF details, I realized it was fishy,” Khan said.

He cited the example of a garbage contractor in RT Nagar who carried multiple ATM cards and withdrew around Rs 7 lakh from different accounts but paid pourakarmikas a paltry Rs 3,000-4,000 as against the mandated Rs 7,000. There were instances of contractors raising bills in the name of 80 pourakarmikas but deputing only 40 on the ground, and deploying compactors once in two days but raising bills for all 30 days of the month, he said.

30,000 pourakarmikas fictional

Khan said while the bills and ESI and PF claimed pointed at nearly 45,000 pourakarmikas at work in the city, biometric attendance revealed only 15,000 were on the field.

“I took the help of a private individual to track the genuineness of the compactors claimed by the contractors. Bills were being claimed for 600 compactors at the rate of Rs 1.5 lakh each but our investigations revealed that only 350 compactors were dumping waste at landfills,” he added.

I was threatened: Khan

Things were never smooth for the BBMP’s solid waste management cell, which ran into resistance at every step. “We directed all contractors to download an app to track where their auto-tippers were going. There was no cooperation. It took six months for them to download the app, which showed there were only 1,800 tippers on the field as against the 5,500 for which bills were claimed. The central data centre to monitor vehicles found that most of the remaining vehicles were two-wheelers. When I ordered filing of a police complaint, I was even threatened,” Khan said.