Aafrin Kidwai 
The Bhubaneshwar civic body, which has been facing complaints of inadequate solid waste management in residential areas has decided to give residents and Swacch Saathis in each ward, the ability to certify waste collection in order to release funds to private companies hired for this purpose.
A local from each street or lane will confirm for the BMC in a registry kept at the ward level how many households the NGOs it enlisted for door-to-door collection were collected.
Likewise, BMC-appointed Swachh Sathis in each of the 67 wards will confirm and certify the number of households that NGOs cover each day for waste pickup in their region. The amount of waste the NGOs collected from homes in a day from each ward will then be compared to this verification by locals and Swachh Sathis.
“The average daily waste produced at the household level is between 350 and 400 gram. According to Suvendu Kumar Sahoo, deputy commissioner for sanitation at BMC, “comparison of this data with the household figure will offer a reasonable notion whether the service providers are genuinely covering the number of households maintained in the register.
The BMC expects that this will increase transparency.
According to Sahoo, money is now given to service providers who perform door-to-door waste collection based on the amount of kilometres they travel each day. Along with the driver’s daily salary and wages of two semi-skilled labourers, they were paid the cost of gasoline every eight kilometres to deliver the service. But from now on, it will compensate for the number of houses they service each day.
As part of the new waste collection method, BMC has collaborated with a total of seven NGOs. Over 50 wards have already started receiving domestic waste from the NGOs. The remaining wards will soon be transferred to them by the city council, reports The New Indian Express.
