We lack pride: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw flags garbage issue in big cities, calls out misgovernance

Mumbai, Oct 16 (IANS) Biocon chief Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw on Thursday raised serious concerns over garbage emerging as a "serious malaise" in the country, particularly in big metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and others.

She also slammed the respective municipalities of these cities, as well as state governments, for their gross ignorance and negligence of the issue, which has been reaching alarming levels lately and posing a serious threat to the well-being of citizens.

Kiran Shaw’s flagging of garbage and filth in Mumbai comes in the backdrop of her online stand-off with the Karnataka government over the ‘creaking’ infrastructure of Bengaluru and accumulating waste in the city.

Taking to X, the country's leading woman industrialist highlighted the city’s crumbling infrastructure and poor garbage management; however, this prompted a quick retort and rebuttal from Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar and other ministers.

Unfazed by criticism, the leading entrepreneur on Thursday shared a video of garbage and filth littered around a water reservoir, apparently from Bandra East (Mumbai) and called out the apathy and callousness of the city administration.

“Garbage is a serious malaise countrywide and no municipality of big cities has managed to solve it. Indore and Surat seemed to have cracked it but Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru etc haven’t,” she said in a post on X, while sharing the video of a waste-littered water body, posted by an X user.

“Very very pathetic which shows citizens lack of civic sense and huge apathy by both citizens and administration. We lack pride,” she added.

Shaw’s criticism of the big cities comes in line with their poor ranking on multiple national and international indexes, ranging from clean air to cleanliness to traffic snarls.

Delhi, Mumbai, as well as Bengaluru have failed to find a ‘respectable’ ranking in Swachh Sarvekshan -- a yearly ranking exercise undertaken by the Central government to assess cleanliness.

Delhi has been battling with toxic air for years, Mumbai with traffic snarls, while Bengaluru often gets choked due to poor roads and traffic congestion, the videos of which have often surfaced on social media, creating embarrassment for the ruling dispensation, while also projecting a sorry figure of the city's infrastructure before the world.

--IANS

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