Even as the Western Railway (WR) and BMC make tall claims about actively implementing the Swachh Bharat Mission, both these agencies have collectively failed in cleaning up a plot that has turned into a garbage dumping ground.
DNA first raised the issue of how garbage by illegal slums is regularly dumped in an open WR plot adjacent to the railway tracks near Bandra (East) over two-and-a-half months ago, but despite regular follow ups, the problem continues to persist with no resolution.
Clarifying his position, Assistant Municipal Commissioner Ashok Khairnar (H-East ward) said that despite the plot belonging to WR, the BMC has — on three occasions — undertaken clean-up drives and even asked its staff to manually clean the plot. "Our staff met the locals from the nearby slums and requested them to not throw the garbage there and instead dump it at a different site from where the BMC will clear it. Yet, many of the people, who lack civic sense, simply dump all the garbage on the plot," he said, adding it was high time the WR took ownership of the land and figured out some concrete steps to tackle this regular illegal dumping.
Officials from H-East ward, who were involved in the clean-up, also complained that they did not get any support from the WR even during the clearing of the garbage, which mostly consisted of plastic, household waste and a large quantity of cloth waste.
However, a WR official from Bandra station passed the buck on to the BMC and said that they were looking for a permanent solution to the problem, so unless the BMC removes all the encroachments or provides alternate arrangements for garbage disposal, the problem will not be solved.
"The work of WR is to run trains and not manage garbage collection. Since the garbage is coming from slums, which are under BMC, it is the duty of the civic body and not railways," said the official.
BMC officials have now proposed a joint meeting with the WR to come up with a permanent solution to this menace, as lakhs of commuters using the Bandra foot overbridge daily have long been complaining about the need to clear the pile.
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