BANGALORE - Almitra Patel, a civil engineer by qualification,
says she was first alerted to India's huge problem of inadequate
waste disposal when she noticed that the frogs in the marshlands
near her farmhouse, on the city's outskirts, had stopped
croaking. Seeing that the frogs had died from sewage and garbage
being dumped in the wetlands, she petitioned the Supreme Court
in 1996 to intervene and get the city fathers to take
responsibility for safe waste Investigations showed that less
than half of the sewage produced by this global information
technology hub was being managed in modern treatment plants,
with the rest ending up as raw, untreated sewage in the city's
lakes and Patel won her suit to make the safe disposal of waste
a municipal responsibility, but management of solid waste and
sewage remains a national "The marshlands (around Bangalore)
have now turned into a deep, black stinking river of sewage that
flows in an open channel through dense habitation to an
expensive power-guzzling treatment plan