Conked-out bulldozers leave Capital littered
Did you find more than usual garbage lying unattended in your locality for the last few days? Well, broken down bulldozers of the MCD are to be blamed for the filth.
Did you find more than usual garbage lying unattended in your locality for the last few days? Well, broken down bulldozers of the MCD are to be blamed for the filth.
The city generates as much as 8,500 tonnes of garbage daily, which is sent to sanitary landfill sites (SLF) at Bhalswa and Ghazipur.
At Bhalswa SLF, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) employs five bulldozers. As these SLFs are filled to their capacity, these machines are used to flatten the garbage dumped by one truck to facilitate dumping by the next truck. The MCD has outsourced the maintenance of these bulldozers to a private company.
Four of the five machines have broken down, hampering the speed in a big way. The solitary bulldozer is left to handle a long line of trucks waiting to dump the garbage into the landfill site and flatten it.
Trucks are now taking up to four hours to do what was earlier a job finished in minutes. The result is, even if the contractors pick the garbage from the streets of Delhi, there is a huge backlog to dump the garbage at the landfill site.
In January, the MCD had started a Facebook page to address the garbage collection site issues. People lauded the effort, as the civic body aimed to have 2,100 clean sites with garbage lifted daily.
Netizen and Delhi citizen Monica Bhatia asked on the MCD's Facebook page, "I hear that there has been a problem for the last several days at the landfill sites due to which garbage is not being lifted. Can we get a clarification on this? What is the problem? Who is responsible? What is MCD's plan for preventing this from happening again (sic)?"
Said Deep Mathur, MCD's director (press and information), "The existing bulldozers are not working to their full capacity due to technical reasons. (We are planning) how to optimise the process of levelling of solid waste at our sanitary landfill sites."
Mathur also claimed that whenever there is breakdown during operation, MCD ensures immediate repair round-the- clock so that the work doesn't suffer.
"We are going to place order for purchase of three bulldozers with immediate effect. It has also been decided to purchase more bulldozers as per requirement by following tendering procedure," Mathur added.