BMC earns nat’l award for sludge mgmt

Bhubaneswar: The smart city’s faecal sludge and septage management was adjudged the best by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industries (Ficci) and Indian Sanitation Coalition (ISC) on Wednesday.
Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) mayor Sulochana Das received the award for ‘Best Faecal Sludge and Septage Management’ at the 6th ISC-FICCI Sanitation Awards and India Sanitation Conclave in New Delhi.
In other categories, Sasmita Barik (26), a Swachh Sathi from Bhadrak Municipality, won the ‘Women Changemaker in Sanitation’ award, while Jajpur district got the ‘Best Skilling Initiative in Sanitation’ award.
Ficci and ISC had invited urban local bodies of the country to submit entries on their best practices and BMC had applied for its septage management in March. The joint survey by Ficci and ISC was conducted in September.
The city has a state-of-the-art faecal sludge treatment plant (FSTP) that has earned praise from several states and from the Centre earlier. The plant treats both solid and liquid septage through an integrated system. It uses a decentralised waste water treatment system.
Suvendu Sahu, BMC deputy commissioner (sanitation), said they operationalised the first sewerage treatment plant with the capacity to treat 75 kilolitres (KLD) of waste daily in 2018. “In view of the increasing demand, we set up another 75 KLD plant which started functioning in 2021. Faecal sludge used to be illegally disposed off earlier in drains and open fields. Now, only authorised agencies are allowed to extract faecal sludge in designated cesspool vehicles,” he said.
According to the Faecal Sludge and Septage Management (FSSM) Rules, 2018, only agencies registered with the BMC can transport faecal sludge.
In October last year, for effective disposal of faecal sludge from slums, the BMC introduced affordable tariff for extraction and disposal in cesspool vehicles. The cost of lifting of sludge per trip earlier was Rs 900, but now the slum residents can avail the services for Rs 492 (excluding taxes) per trip. In each trip, two households can be covered, which means each will have to pay Rs 280 (including tax). The BMC has procured eight 3,000-litre capacity cesspool vehicles and has authorized 30 private cesspools to extract and dump sludge at the designated sewerage treatment plant at Basuaghai.
In December 2020, the BMC became the first civic body in the country to launch the national toll-free number (14420) to receive complaints related to faecal sludge management. The number is linked to the one (18003450061) launched earlier by the BMC.