Delhi’s MCD sanitation staff to get smartwatches to track productivity

MCD covers around 15,582 km of colony roads which are manually swept by over 50,000 sanitation workers

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi is planning to provide smart watches to sanitation workers as a pilot project to track and monitor cleanliness operations in the city at the micro level, officials aware of the development said on Tuesday.

The smart watches will be equipped with GPS (Pexels)

The smart watches will be equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) facility to track the movement of workers and sweeping operations, and will log their attendance, a senior municipal official from the department of environment management services (sanitation) wing said, requesting anonymity.

The corporation plans to procure and distribute 2,400 such smart watches — 200 units for each of its twelve administrative zones, officials said.

“The area of duty for a particular sanitation worker will be geofenced and the system will be alerted in case of violations. The watches can also be used to take pictures,” the official added.

The direction to undertake such a pilot project was issued by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal during a meeting on April 6. He also asked MCD to explore the procurement of smaller mechanised cleaning machines which can be deployed in the inner colony roads, while assuring that the government will provide it with 250 sweeping machines for cleaning in wards.

MCD covers around 15,582 km of colony roads which are manually swept by over 50,000 sanitation workers.

At present, the corporation supervises the activities of the sanitation staff through sanitation inspectors.

A second municipal official from the sanitation department said that markets and commercial areas are expected to be swept twice a day. The wider roads (carriageway more than 60ft) are cleaned using mechanical road sweepers.

“If the pilot project is successful, the project can be expanded to other wards as well. The smart watches will replace the geo-tagged ID card, and can also be used in tracking the health of workers,” the official said, wishing not to be named.

Mukesh Baidya, who heads the all municipal corporation sanitation union said that unless corruption is weeded out from the system no form of technological intervention can help improve the situation. “Earlier, the municipal corporation wasted crores on deploying the biometric system. The civic body then tried using the wireless systems to improve co-ordination among sanitation staff but the system is lying dead from the last two years due to lack of funds. They have also tried using mobile app-based attendance to regulate work but the system does not work and workers are found queueing up to get their attendance rectified. Watches will not prove to be different unless the system is cleaned and corrupt practices are stopped,” he added.

The issue with street sweeping and loopholes in the system have been flagged by city residents multiple times. Atul Goyal, who heads URJA (United RWAs Joint Action) — an umbrella body of resident welfare associations in Delhi, said that each ward is divided under sub-wards with road lengths allocated to each worker but the strength is not reflected on the ground.

“There are multiple workers deployed to clean the colony streets but very few people are actually working. Adoption of technology to audit the work is a good idea but the municipal corporation will have to involve local communities and RWAs to get the work audited through cleanliness supervision committees,” Goyal said.