The Hindu : New Delhi News : Take back cleanliness work from NGOs, demand Councillors

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 29, 2005

New Delhi

New Delhi

Take back cleanliness work from NGOs, demand Councillors

Staff Reporter

`Hoards of complaints, experiment proving to be anti-people'

NEW DELHI: Expressing their displeasure over the handing over of sanitation and cleanliness work in the Capital to various non-government organisations, the Municipal Councillors on Thursday demanded that garbage-removal and cleanliness work be handed over to civic body employees. They said so far the experience of this changeover in the three municipal zones has not been satisfactory and as they could not even monitor NGOs functioning, the experiment was proving to be anti-people.

Taking part in a special meeting of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi House called to discuss the issue of sanitation, Councillors from both the ruling Congress and the Opposition BJP asked the Commissioner to stop the process of handing over sanitation work to NGOs in the remaining nine of the total 12 zones and scrap the agreement with the organisations in the three zones -- Shahdara (North), Shahdara (South) and West.

Councillors said they have been receiving complaints from residents of the three zones that there has been no improvement in sanitary conditions in their areas, so there was no point of snatching work from over 50,000 civic body's civic employees and handing it over to private agencies.

Moreover, they could not monitor the functioning of these organisations so that civic condition could be improved. But when the civic employees were in charge, they had the liberty of at least directing them and get things done.

All this is proving to a major problem, they added.

During the discussion, the BJP Councillor, Vijender Gupta, alleged that diesel was being stolen from trucks carrying garbage causing annual loss of at least Rs. 8 crores to the Corporation, while private contractors were also not properly carrying garbage to landfill sites and were able to get slips for the same from the site in connivance with civic employees deployed there. He also demanded a CBI probed into the cases of diesel theft from Municipal trucks.

At the meeting, the Mayor, Satbir Singh, assured the House that there sanitary condition of the city would be improved by improved monitoring and deploying additional manpower. He warned the civic body employees of strict action is silt from drains was not removed within four days.

On the issue of stray animal, the Municipal Commissioner, Rakesh Mehta, informed that during the past three months, two people have lost their lives due to attack by stray bulls while around over half-a-dozen people have been injured. A special drive was on to tackle this menace, he added.

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