MARGAO
With door-to-door segregated waste collection repeatedly coming a cropper in the commercial capital, an agitated Margao Municipal Council Chairperson Babita Angle Prabhudesai on Monday issued a fiat to the municipal staff to concentrate only in one ward and then replicate the experiment in other wards phase wise.
Beginning with Independence Day on August 15, the Margao Municipal Council will now put its manpower and machinery in ward No 1 of the municipality comprising the areas of Mungul and Madel and collect segregated waste form from households.
The MMC chief issued the fiat after a meeting with the municipal officials while expressing complete unhappiness over the slow progress of the door-to-door waste collection. “Our efforts have failed to yield the desired results in the five wards that we had concentrated to collect segregated waste. I have now told the municipal officials to leave all the wards and concentrate only in one ward at a time. Hence, the municipality will collect segregated waste form ward No 1 from Independence Day,” Babita told the media after the meeting.
She said the MMC will be willing to provide the required separate bins for the households located across the areas of Mungul and Madel and ask the commercial establishments to arrange their own bins for collection of both dry and wet wastes. “We have to start somewhere. Our efforts on the waste segregation front have not yielded the desired results till date,” she added.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that MMC has shortlisted ward No 1 for the collection of segregated waste. In fact, ward No 1 was the first ward of MMC which was taken up by the civic body for collection of waste door to door around a decade ago.
Segregation of waste at source has eluded the municipality over the years. Despite the Goa State Urban Development Agency (GSUDA) supplying thousands of bins to the city households for segregation of wet and dry waste around half a decade ago, and the civic body following up the gesture by engaging an army of 100-odd daily wage workers to collect the waste door to door, there has been no success on this front.
That’s not all. While the civic body had time and again adopted resolutions to outsource door-to-door waste collection to a private agency, the ground reality has remained unchanged with the tender floated by the municipality for outsourcing the task coming a cropper owing to the delay in allotting the work to the successful bidder.
