Bengaluru: In the light of a report submitted by the state government to the National Green Tribunal (NGT) that apartments are the least-polluting bodies, apartment-dwellers lambasted the BWSSB for accusing them of being incompetent.
According to the report, of the 755 apartments inspected by the KSPCB and BWSSB in the Bellandur Lake catchment area, 390 have installed sewage treatment plants (STPs), which treat 48.21 MLD of sewage, while the remaining 319 apartments which have not installed STP generate 13.66 MLD of waste.
Mr Srikanth Narasimhan, general secretary, Bangalore Apartments’ Federation (BAF), said, “Only 2.8% of the sewage in the underground sewer is coming from apartments, while 97.2% is coming from individual houses and small buildings. The BWSSB is trying to cover up their incompetence through absurd notifications, like retrospective STP.”
The report states that 466.34 MLD of the sewage, which constitutes about 97.2% of the waste, is generated by individual houses and smaller buildings and is let into the underground sewer. The federation believes that houses which let out sewage into the sewer should not be blamed as the BWSSB which should have set up a centralised STP at the exit points of sewers and has failed in its duty resulting in the pollution of Bellandur Lake.
Mr N. Satish, chief engineer, BWSSB (wastewater management), defended the order on the installation of STPs by apartments. “For old apartments with over 50 units, installation of STPs is mandatory, while for newer ones with more than 20 units it has been made mandatory. We are already coming up with four more STPs in the upstream of the lake,” he said.
Mr R. Balasubramanian, president, BAF, said that thousands of decentralised STPs built on a retrospective basis, portends a significant environmental disaster for the city and the government should realize the fact or else the lakes will suffer.
