PUNE: The city's trash problem could aggravate because the residents of Uruli Devachi and Phursungi on Saturday rejected the Pune Municipal Corporation's request to allow open dumping of waste in the garbage depot in village limits.Mayor Mukta Tilak and other civic officers held a meeting with the villagers and assured them the civic body would soon stop open dumping of garbage. Yet, the villagers rejected the mayor's request to allow dumping temporarily.The villagers have been stopping the corporation's vehicles from the last week, after a fire broke out at the garbage depot. They said the civic body had contaminated their water sources and farmlands through garbage dumping."We made every effort to convince the villagers but they refused to allow garbage dumping. I have spoken with chief minister Devendra Fadnavis so that the problem does not aggravate. I shall speak to him and the villagers again," Tilak told TOI.She said the civic body assured the villagers it would slowly reduce the quantity of openly dumped garbage as the city would have new garbage processing units. But the villagers said the corporation never kept its promises. "We are not dumping wet garbage in the depot. Also, the government has identified the land for setting up the processing units around the city limits. But land acquisition is a sensitive matter and the state is dealing with caution," said Tilak."We have communicated to the villagers that PMC will soon have more garbage processing units and there will be no open dumping in village limits," said Jagtap. The PMC's solid waste management head, Suresh Jagtap , said the PMC was trying to collect all garbage across the city and process them in available units. But some citizens complained that trash was piling because the waste collection had come to a grinding halt.

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