It’s Friday night – 10 p.m. A few parts of the city are experiencing drizzle. Braving the rain is a group of men getting to start work on the 100 Feet Road. After wearing their reflector jackets, the 20-odd men pull out shovel, brooms and tubs from a vehicle meant for transporting waste.
Starting from the western end of the road, near Power House, the group goes about sweeping and removing mud that is accumulated along the median. One among the workers is regulating the gradually reducing traffic away from the men at work.
One set of men brooms the mud nearby, the second scoops the accumulated mud, which has become wet and heavier because of the rain, and the third collects and dump it to the vehicle next to it.
A Coimbatore Corporation sanitary inspector, who supervises the work, says the workers who have started the work at 10 p.m. will complete it by 1 a.m. Saturday, cleaning both sides of the median and road margins as well.
A few km away, near the North Coimbatore flyover, is another set of workers cleaning the flyover exit that leads to the Mettupalayam Road. To caution the road users, the supervisor has placed traffic cones to divert the vehicles away from the workers.
The supervisor says the men will not only remove mud but also bushes that have grown alongside the roads and even the surface after work. Similarly, teams of workers are engaged in cleaning the State Bank of India Road and a few other arterial roads in the city. From those places the Corporation will take the collected mud to its dump yard at Vellalore, says a sanitary inspector.
The Corporation began night sweeping operations in the city in the second week of July at Flower Market in West Zone, following instructions from Commissioner Sravan Kumar Jatavath.
Following the success of the operation, the Corporation has formed a team of 20 conservancy workers a zone, drawing them from the pool of workers available, to expand the night cleaning drive to all zones in the city, say sources in the Health Wing. The Corporation has also drawn an equal number of men who will go about cleaning the city's streets in residential areas during the day. The sources say the civic body chose to launch the night cleaning operation because it is easier to clean the arterial roads at night when the traffic is at its minimum. After drawing the men, the Corporation has also prepared a weekly schedule for the zonal sanitary officers and sanitary inspectors to clean according to the plan.
As part of this plan, officials in the Central Zone will also clean the town and mofussil bus stands in Gandhipuram, those in West Zone will clean the Mettupalayam Road bus stand and the East and South Zone officials will clean the Singanallur and Ukkadam bus stands.
A sanitary inspector in the Central Zone says the civic body deployed a water tanker with pressure pump to clean the town bus stand.
But the effect of the cleaning drive did not last long because a bus driver washed hands and dumped food waste right from his seat after his dinner. The conservancy workers had to educate him.
A zonal sanitary officer says that during the night cleaning drive, the staff on duty are also engaging roadside eateries to properly dispose of the food waste.
The drive has started in the right earnest but the Corporation needs to better equip the workers with the right tools and machinery, says a sanitary officer. It has to provide road sweeping machines, small earth movers, ‘men at work’ barricades, etc.
Senior officials say the civic body is in the process of buying the tools and machinery. It will soon buy 100 small goods carriers and deploy a few of those for the night sweeping drive. As for the road sweeping machine, the Corporation had purchased three lorries with such vehicles sometime in 2010, in the run up to the World Classical Tamil Conference.
It is trying to see if it can repair the machines or buy new ones.
Sanitary officers say the Corporation stopped using the three machines it purchased in 2010 at around ₹ 1.50 crore because they were diesel guzzlers. The Corporation should look for those machines that other urban local bodies are successfully using and are easily repaired. Commenting the Corporation’s night cleaning drive, solid waste management expert Suresh Bhandari says that in addition to drawing the timetable, the civic body should ensure that it assigns a road or a part of it to a worker or a group of workers and hold them accountable if that road or stretch is dirty.
Unless the Corporation does this there will be no accountability and workers will not return for long to a stretch they had cleaned.