Scare of COVID-19 aka coronavirus after confirmation of one positive case, has put the State government on tenterhooks, but failed to move the sanitation juggernaut of GHMC.
Sweeping of the roads and garbage clearance have been hit very badly for the past few days, owing to lack of supervision at zonal-level. Complaints abound about trash piling up everywhere in the city, especially near the blue dumper bins.
Dumper bins in areas such as Nallakunta, Vidyanagar and Kavadiguda are seen overflowing with garbage, and shop keepers had to take brooms in their hands to keep the area clean.
“For the past one week, nobody is coming to sweep the area, nor to lift the garbage. We have been doing the sweeping all by ourselves, so that the shop fronts are clean,” Mohammed Jahangir, a shop owner from Ramnagar, said.
Enquiries with the sanitation staff yielded him a reply that sweeping machines were going to be deployed in the area, hence the GHMC workers are deployed elsewhere.
The GHMC has recently outsourced maintenance and upkeep of 709 kilometres of major roads to private agencies, along with sanitation responsibilities on these roads to the selected bidders.
The agencies were to assume the sanitation responsibilities from March 1. They, however, failed to do so, and sought more time to work out the logistics, officials informed. They have been given time up to March 10 subsequently.
Owing to communication lapse, the extension of sanitation services by GHMC on these respective roads has not reached the field-level staff, and the workers have not been redeployed to their previous locations, sources from GHMC informed.
Recent decentralisation of garbage transport services to the zonal-level officials too has apparently added to the problem, with no centralised authority to focus on the disarray.
Further, deployment of sanitation field assistants on a survey to enumerate illiterate persons in the city too has compounded the issue, sources say.