the goan I network
MARGAO
The Margao Municipal Council on Wednesday flagged of its fresh exercise to collect segregated waste door-to-door, but the same old problems came to stare at the municipal workers engaged in the exercise with households handing over unsegregated waste.
Bereft of any educational programme in the six municipal wards shortlisted for the exercise, day one of the door-to-door segregated waste collection exercise in the six municipal wards falling in Fatorda constituency evoked the same old response, with more than 90 per cent of the households handing over to the workers unsegregated waste.
Margao Municipal officials pointed out that while the 45 workers roped in to carry out the task of collecting the segregated waste went door-to-door on Wednesday, but only a handful of households have handed over the segregate waste.
What's interesting to note is that while the civic body has started the exercise - the third time in the last half a decade - sans any awareness programme, questions are doing the rounds in the corridors of the civic body how come the Council has kicked off the exercise without opening the Expression of Interest invited by the Municipality to rope in an agency to conduct the awareness programme.
Sources in the know pointed out that the Municipality had earmarked an amount of Rs 5-7 lakh for the avowed objective of engaging a private agency to carry out an educational programme in the city to convince the household owners to hand over segregated form of waste to the workers.
Margao Municipal Council Babita Angle Prabhudesai, however, remained unperturbed over the lukewarm response to the door-to-door waste collection, saying that things will fall in place once the awareness and educated programme mooted by the civic body takes off by month-end or early next month. "When we decided to start the exercise in the six municipal wards, we had anticipated various problems, including the problem of unsegregated waste handed over by the households to our workers," she said.
Babita, however, exuded confidence that the ground reality may change for the better once the civic body ropes in a private agency to carry out the education programme. "We have already invited an Expression of Interest to engage a private agency to carry out the task of spreading education in the city asking the people to segregate the waste in their homes before handing over the same to the Municipal workers. The EoP will be opened later this week and if everything goes well, the agency will start operating by the month-end or early next month," she added.
Municipal officials pointed out that a number of households even questioned the workers for asking for segregated waste on the argument that they had been paying for the collection of the waste door-to-door.
