Central team visits Lucknow with undisclosed identity, to quiz locals

LUCKNOW: The Central team handling Swachh Bharat Survey in Lucknow has begun its validation work from March 6, 2018. The team is operating in a more secretive manner this year without disclosing its name and other such personal details to the locals or even Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) officials.
Three officials are out on field with the contacts of sanitary inspectors to quiz them on their work and even cross check with the locals. The team can quiz any resident over next four days about LMC's performance last year.

The team comprising five members arrived at LMC head-office on Tuesday morning. This year the team is being extra conscious on not to reveal its name or other details to anyone- not even to the LMC officials presenting documents before them. The move is to ensure complete transparency in the evaluation.

While two members scanned through the documents of LMC related to areas like open defecation, sanitation, garbage disposal, bio-metric attendance of sanitary staff, collection of household garbage etc, the other three members went out on field with the names and contact number of sanitary inspectors. The two members scanning LMC documents are also uploading it on the Central server.

The team surveyed the localities of zone 1 like Narhi, Kaiserbagh and Babu Banarasi Das ward etc to examine the cleanliness status in public toilets, garbage dumping grounds, market places, residential areas etc. They quizzed the shopkeepers about the sweeping schedule, number of dustbins deployed, garbage collection from market, attendance of sweepers etc.

The members are not disclosing their names to any person. LMC officials said that the documentation work and its verification on field will be done in 2-3 days after which a new team will conduct an independent observation. City’s rank will depend on aggregate marks scored in all three stages- documentation, validation and independent observation.