Drivers pushed too hard: BBMP trucks turn killers

"This is highly taxing on the driver of a huge truck to drive through heavy traffic, if not boredom, fatigue will engulf him impairing his skills of traffic judgement," says Vadivelu, a driver

Bengaluru: The garbage clearance system in Bengaluru is still a big mess, and now the people of Bengaluru are dying for it. Call it travesty or gross the taxpayers are coming under the wheels of the garbage trucks. In the last sixty days, four persons have been run down by the monstrous garbage trucks. Though the Bengaluru police and the BBM authorities try to reason it under traffic accidents, legal experts in the human rights and civic rights activist groups prefer to call it 'culpable homicide'.

On the surface, these accidents do look like traffic accidents but the reason behind the rashly driven garbage trucks goes beyond just that. It is a management failure on part of the BBMP and its contractors. The garbage transport system in the city is mismanaged, the contractors attribute it to the number of compactor trucks being less than desired and each truck needs to cover not less than 20-30 kilometres from the city area to the dumping yards in Mavallipura, Mundur and the waste segregation centres through thick traffic conditions.

Each of the 593 compactor trucks will have to make ideally 2 trips from the city to the assigned Solid Waste Management Centre, but according to the crew of the trucks, each driver was forced to make four trips in short durations of 3 hours between the trips. "This is highly taxing on a driver of a huge truck to drive through the heavy traffic, if not boredom, fatigue will engulf him impairing his skills of traffic judgement," says Vadivelu, a driver.

Between the trips, there is not even a break of 5 minutes. "For instance, a driver has been tasked to take a compactor truck loaded with garbage to a distance of 22-kilometre Mysuru road to Mavallipura it takes not less than 90 minutes to 120 minutes, he has to make this trip thrice, in the cases of other highly urban areas inside the core city the task becomes even tougher," said another driver Muthuraju.

The drivers are pushed harder by their contractors for doing more trips every day. "There is a shortage of compactor trucks, for a city of this size generating nearly 2,200 tons per day of both wet and dry waste, there should have been at last 650 compactor vehicles against the present 596 vehicles. As a result, the drivers are pressured by the contractors and assign timing for the onward and return journey" says Ramaraju (name changed on request) transport contractors.

A retired Regional Transport officer Nagaraj says assigning timing for heavy vehicles plying through the city was foolish. "Such a condition had also taken toll of lives in cities like Mangaluru where the private transport operators run buses in a gap of 45 seconds in the city roads and 2 minutes on the mofussil and nationalised route. This has caused road rage in that city and many people have been killed by the speeding buses".

" The owners of private buses engage in many illegal practices like giving the vehicle on unwritten lease to a driver and a conductor who can operate on the route at the end of the day they have to remit the lease amount for the day and whatever is left is their remuneration. This practice has been condemned by the road users and complaints have been lodged with the police and the Regional Transport Office but of no avail" says rights activist Hanumanth Kamath.

Similarly, in various parts of the state, transport operators in mining, sand extraction and passenger movement HTV traffic had been rendered erratic and rash.