The city’s revamped sanitation plan has set a target to make the city roads garbage-free as per the new contract finalised by the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) recently.

The Corporation was contemplating to bring a change in the sanitation model to enforce better hygiene in the city limits. BMC had decided in the past to divide the 53 wards in the city into four zones to simplify the implementation of sanitation projects.

As per the new contract, the city has been divided into four packages and three separate contractors have been assigned the project. Jagruti has been assigned two packages while Ramky Group and PMR Consultants have been handed over one package each.

The most important target of the revamped sanitation model is ‘no garbage on ground’. A senior BMC official said all three sanitation contractors have been asked to ensure supply of adequate amount of dustbins so that no garbage is disposed on the roads. According to the contract, they will take care of sweeping the roads, desilting the drains and collecting the garbage and transporting it to the dumping ground near Sainik School.

The payment for the work will be made on the basis of weight of the garbage deposited daily at the dumping ground for which BMC will set up a weighing machine.

With the city generating about 450 tonnes of garbage everyday, each package is expected to collect roughly 75 tonnes per day.

If any of the contractors fails to gather the requisite amount of garbage, it will be fined. BMC’s City Health Officer (CHO) will be responsible for monitoring the complete sanitation of the city.

The online monitoring system, which ran into controversy last year, will not be a part of the new sanitation model.

As per the previous monitoring mechanism, the attendance of the sanitation workers and garbage collection was monitored online through photographs.

 A private company’s staff clicked photographs of the sanitation workers in the morning and also of the dustbins from where the garbage was collected. These photographs were uploaded on BMC’s website.

But this will not be applicable for the new contractors who will be monitored directly by the CHO and his department. No decision has been taken on the fate of the online monitoring system which many of the corporators had demanded to be shut down last year.