Finally, Indore session for outdoor gain

Gurgaon: An MCG team led by the commissioner himself is in Indore to study what India’s cleanest city does right and what Gurgaon does not — the gap between the two cities in the last Swachh Bharat rankings a yawning 82 spots.
It’s never too late to pick up a new skill. Except that Indore has been India’s cleanest city since 2017, and its practices have been widely written about and studied by other cities, governments and municipalities. This makes the Gurgaon municipal corporation’s learning curve a rather long one; the results from the current Indore experience will take at least another year to reflect in the Swachh Survekshan rankings since the 2020 evaluation is over.
MCG commissioner Vinay Pratap Singh wants the best practices followed by Indore to be implemented in Gurgaon in a ‘customised’ manner. The MCG, sources said, wants to make a drastic improvement in its Swachh score for the next survey. A series of meetings on sanitation chaired by the MCG commissioner were held in a single day last week to discuss what can be done to perform better.
During the Indore trip, the MCG team is focusing on understanding the Madhya Pradesh city’s efficient solid waste management system.
The MCG is discussing several measures, including installation of devices outside every house to check whether garbage has been collected or not, identifying garbage pick-up points, making it mandatory for ‘safai karamcharis’ to wear uniforms and starting quarterly evaluation of sanitation, and introducing incentives for sanitation workers.
The team visiting Indore includes mayor Madhu Azad, additional commissioner Amar Deep Jain, senior sanitation inspector Rishi Malik and three councillors — Seema Pahuja, Ravinder Yadav and Mahesh Dayma. The team visited Indore’s waste management plant set up by a private company in public-private partnership mode. The team also met the officials of the municipal corporation of Indore.
“An MCG delegation visited Indore to study their solid waste management model and adopt best practices for improving sanitation status in Gurgaon. Their material recovery facility is being managed by Nepra and is a state-of-the-art facility. Learnings from the visit will be implemented in Gurgaon,” Singh told TOI.
Singh, who took charge of MCG recently, in the new year, is driving the civic body’s latest efforts to clean up Gurgaon, a task the city’s administration has found challenging. He said Indore’s solid waste segregation, collection and transportation, management of wet and dry waste, monitoring mechanism for solid waste collection, material recovery facility and wet waste compost plant operations are areas MCG plans to work on.