Gurugram: MCG plans to adopt measures taken by Indore civic body

Gurugram: To improve the city’s cleanliness and hygiene, the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) is planning to adopt several measures taken by the Indore Municipal Corporation, said officials on Wednesday.

For the purpose, MCG will be conducting a workshop on Swachh Survekshan 2021 at the Sector 27 community centre on Thursday where a few examples of the Indore model would also be shown to the officials and councillors.

In the 2020 Swachh Survekshan, Gurugram finished with a rank of 62 out of 382 cities across India. Indore was ranked first for the fourth consecutive year.

In February, a team of MCG officials and councillors had toured Indore to study its cleanliness model. Mayor Madhu Azad said that MCG had planned to introduce various measures in the city soon after. However, due to the coronavirus outbreak, these plans had to be deferred.

“Our visit earlier this year gave us first-hand experience of Indore’s cleanliness model. We had planned to introduce several measures, which the Indore Municipal Corporation had adopted, into Gurugram right away, but these had to be put on hold due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, we are looking to introduce these measures once again,” said Azad.

Azad said that one of the key learnings for MCG was regarding the cleanliness measures adopted at the household level.

“In Indore, waste is segregated at source. There are different bins in each household for organic and inorganic waste, and incorrect dumping invites heavy penalties. The city also has a strong mechanism for composting organic waste. If these are followed by all Gurugram residents, then the city’s cleanliness levels will improve drastically,” said Azad.

The fine in Gurugram for this violation is only Rs 100. In Indore, it is Rs 1000 for households and Rs 5,000 for commercial buildings, the officials said.

As per the MCG officials, Thursday’s workshop would be carried out in two batches. The first half would be for officials of the MCG, municipal committees of Sohna, Pataudi, Farrukhnagar and Hailey Mandi, while the other would be for councillors from these areas.

Harbhajan Singh, a consultant with MCG, said that few examples of the Indore cleanliness model will be shown to the officials during the workshop while ways to improve various criteria such as door-to-door collection of waste, waste segregation, construction and demolition waste, plastic waste, composting, and cleaning of roads and markets would also be discussed extensively.

The officials said that MCG is looking to also replicate Indore’s practice of taking attendance of sanitation workers through biometric machines, keeping a track on waste collection, cleaning of roads and markets at night, processing gas from waste which can be used as fuel in public buses, and removing large garbage bins from public spaces.

Another key feature the officials said that MCG wants to replicate is to charge Rs 2 for every guest during weddings. “The rationale behind charging fees for weddings is for municipal workers to pick up all the garbage and clean the wedding premises. Barring the making fuel from waste, all the remaining measures can be achieved in a short duration and MCG has also introduced a few measures towards this end,” an MCG official privy to the matter said.

The official said that in February, MCG introduced the Swachh Nagar app in Sector 38, in which barcodes were installed outside a few selected households. In this model, a sanitation worker after collecting waste scanned the barcode outside the house and filled details such as the type of waste collected, the time of collection, whether the household owner was absent or if the door of the house was locked. These information would then immediately reach the senior officers of the civic body.

The official further said that MCG is yet to take a final call on whether the fines for the dumping of waste incorrectly would be increased in the city. However, he said that the matter is under consideration.

Last month, on a pilot basis, MCG had handed out smart hand bands to a few sanitation workers to keep a track on their whereabouts. In regards to the cleaning of roads and public places at night, on August 31, MCG officials said that a target of daily cleaning of more than 200 kilometres of roads had been set, for which 10 sweeping machines were recently procured.