Over 35% sanitary workers recalcitrant, finds GPS data

Nagpur: Even after introducing GPS-enabled wrist watches to curb irregularities in attendance and improvement in the city’s sanitation service, over 35% sanitary workers of Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) remain absent from their duties.
Sanitary workers in Gandhibagh zone, which has the highest manpower strength (894), are also the biggest offenders. This was revealed by the control room of GPS-enabled wrist watches at NMC’s headquarters in Civil Lines. The zone is predominantly a commercial hub and with 55% attendance of sanitary workers, it has recorded the lowest attendance among all 10 zones in February.

The health department’s initiative to track sanitary workers through GPS-enabled wrist watches in Satranjipura zone found 42% absenteeism in February.

The Dhantoli zone saw improvement with 80% attendance of sanitary workers last month. Sources said the reason behind the highest number of attendance in this zone is that several workers live in the same vicinity. So, their GPS watches show them active in their respective beats or place of works, sources said.

Recently, BJP corporator Bunty Kukde exposed irregularities in sanitary workers’ attendance in his prabhag in Nehru Nagar zone, where he found six GPS-enabled watches dumped outside Wathoda crematorium. Though the workers were not present there, the NMC’s control room showed them as working. Kukde told TOI that around 109 sanitary workers were sanctioned the watches for his prabhag but hardly 23 turn up for work daily.

Despite the high-tech system in place, citizens and even corporators complain about workers’ irregular attendance, sweeping and collection of garbage. With the city’s ranking slipping during the recent announcement of Swachhata Survekshan results, the civic body needs to improve city’s sanitation system.

Since December 2017, the NMC has implemented the system to track sanitary workers through GPS-enable wrist watches under the Smart City project. The civic body pays Rs207 per month towards rental charges for each of 8,000 wrist watches for seven years. The exercise is to record the attendance of over 7,000 NMC sanitary workers.

The objectives of the GPS-enabled wrist watches include recording the shift-wise attendance of sanitary workers, prevention and control of misuse of manual attendance system, maintenance of transparency, accountability in operations and weeding out of fake, duplicate, and false workers.

Under the new system, the attendance were taken ward-wise at the work location and updated immediately from the field using GPS networks daily on a real-time basis.

To a query, a senior official from the NMC’s sanitation department said from this month, the salaries of sanitary workers has been interlinked with the watches. This will definitely increase not only attendance but also improve the city’s sanitation.

No Show

Zones--- Total workers---Attendance (in %)

Laxmi Nagar---564---72

Dharampeth---771---59

Hanuman Nagar---581---67

Dhantoli---513---80

Nehru Nagar---558---64

Gandhibagh---894---55

Satranjipura---651---58

Lakadganj---623---60

Ashi Nagar---826---62

Mangalwari---712---65