To prevent bird strike, airport encourages cleanliness drive

MUMBAI: An intervention by the Mumbai airport shows how diverse constituencies – slum dwellers, airline passengers and environmentalists — can be intricately interlocked. In an attempt to reduce bird strikes, the Adani group which runs the two terminals has commissioned a green social enterprise to counsel residents of the slums surrounding the two airport terminals on sanitation. Pigeons, kites and lapwings hover above open piles of garbage, fly into the planes, and can potentially cause a crash.

“This is the first time there has been a dialogue around garbage and its repercussions on aircraft,” says Hansu Pardiwala, who runs Har Ghar Hara Ghar, a waste management enterprise which has been brought in to work in the Andheri-Kurla settlements. “When you involve the community in cleaning up a particular spot, one of the ways to ensure that it stays clean is by replacing the open garbage dump with something like a cricket pitch or a playground-and-study area for children.”

Pardiwala and her associates have drawn in local ‘influencers’ — especially women in self-help groups or school principals, and used street theatre to create awareness. “The main goal is to prevent the scavenger birds from circling around open garbage,” she says, adding that much of the garbage contains food waste and the entrails of animals from local butchers. Some of the children seemed really concerned and tried to come up with solutions, pointing out that they didn’t even have litter bins in the area.

Both airport terminals are located near L Ward, one of the city’s largest wards with a population of over 8 lakh that mostly lives in slums. “Here, only about 50% of the garbage gets collected because the municipal waste workers often do not come all the way inside the slum,” says Maria Lobo, programs manager of SPARC (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres), an organization that works with the urban poor. “As a result, any kind of open space in the settlement tends to be used as a garbage dumping ground.” Incidentally, one of these slums is where writer Katherine Boo located her searing book that documented the lives of those so low on the food chain that they would eat “the scrub grass at the sewage lake’s edge”.

The impact of bird hits was immortalized in the film ‘Sully’, where a passenger plane made an emergency landing in New York’s Hudson river after hitting a flock of Canadian geese.

In India, bird-strike data reveals that Ahmedabad, Coimbatore and Chennai had the highest number of bird strikes in 2019-20. Bird strikes have been going up over the years, partly because of changes in habitat, migratory patterns and the prevalence of open garbage. “As the aircraft approach and land at a runway or depart from a runway, a funnel clear of birds is essential for aircraft safety,” says a Mumbai airport spokesperson. “We endeavour to achieve it by engagement, sanitation, persuasion. A hazard to aviation is a hazard for people in the surrounding areas too.”