The Times of India            12.09.2013

Now, send an SMS to get garbage cleared from your locality

MANGALORE: If you're worried about garbage piling up in your locality, just send an SMS to 9900536633 in this format - COM, ward number, area/street name, waste not cleared for (number of) days. You'll receive an eight-digit unique number acknowledgment and status report as soon as the garbage is cleared.

The Mangalore City Corporation, in a bid to bring about transparency in solid waste management, had devised a three-pronged strategy. The first one was installing a vehicle-tracking system to monitor the movement of garbage disposal trucks and the second was uploading photographs of clearing of garbage to servers from mobiles by the personnel manning the trucks. The third being implemented after a two-month trial is SMS-based public grievance redressal which plans to address non-clearing of garbage in 60 wards. Manjunath R Shetty, environment engineer a MCC, said the response during the trial was good and depending on the type of complaint, the issue would be addressed within 24 hours to 72 hours.

If the complaint pertains to dustbins in already covered areas, it would be done in 24 hours and others within 72 hours. As of now, 31 vehicles have the Vehicle Tracking System (VTS) which will monitor the route of vehicles. "This was not foolproof and therefore we introduced the uploading of photographs of dustbins before and after clearing the garbage. Often, vehicles with VTS would go near dustbins and return. The vehicle personnel have software uploaded in their mobiles connected to our servers,'' he said.

The corporation server gets about 100-140 photographs daily through this system. The solutions are provided by Kolkata-based Stesalit which has innovative e-governance technologies and solutions which help local governments become more effective.

The area under MCC jurisdiction produces an average of 175 tonnes per day (TPD) of waste, with a daily collection frequency of 160 TPD. The waste collected has a composition of 75% organic, 25% inorganic, 5% combustible and 10% recyclable waste. There are 780 dustbin points and through VTS and photo upload, the corporation is creating a master route plan of the covered area.