The Indian Express 01.04.2013
Pause to Kanpur’s door-to-door garbage collection scheme
The door-to-door collection of solid waste in Kanpur for which the
city received award for Improvement in Solid Waste Management (SWM) in
Urban Infrastructure and Governance from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
for the year 2010 has now stopped operating. Problems created by the
Kanpur Municipal Corporation are to be blamed behind the decision of the
firm — M/s A2Z Infrastructure Ltd, which has the contract to collect
waste and process it — to stop the operation.
According to the firm, the municipal corporation has failed pay
the tipping fees totalling Rs 8 crore that has resulted into a financial
crisis for the firm. “Our expenditure is around Rs 1.5 crore per month
for paying salaries of staff and running the vehicles and processing
plant. But due to delay in payment of the tipping fees from the
municipal corporation, we had to reduce staff at the processing plant
also,” said Sudhikant Tripathi, A2Z’s industrial relations officer.
The SWM project in Kanpur was initiated under the Jawaharlal
Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission scheme at the cost of Rs 56.23
crore on public-private partnership model. M/s A2Z Infrastructure Ltd
bagged the contract and commissioned the processing plant in 2010. It
started door-to-door collection of garbage, its transportation to a
sanitary landfill site spread over 46 hectares, and its processing for
producing bio-fertilizer bags, bricks and tiles from inorganic waste and
refused derived fuel. The firm also set up a power plant of 15 MW
generation capacity that is scheduled to be fully operational next
month.
2,000 staff to collect the municipal waste door-to-door in 110 municipal
wards of Kanpur that generates nearly 1,500 tonne of municipal solid
waste per day. Around 1,200 tonne of garbage was collected daily
door-to-door till February 28 this year. But as door-to-door collection
was stopped from March 1, only about 1,000 staff has work.
According to sources, the delay in payment to A2Z started after
the change of government in UP and the new Samajwadi Party decided to
re-examine the project. “The payment to the firm was regular in the
previous BSP regime,” said an official.
As per the contract, A2Z collects user charges door-to-door and
hands over the collected amount to the municipal corporation and get
back tipping fees at the rate of Rs 470 per tonne. “But as we are not
collecting municipal waste from users, we would not be able to collect
also the user charges in April,” Tripathi said. He said the state
government had notified user charges at the rate of Rs 30 per month for
BPL families to Rs 1,000 per month for commercial buildings.
Tripathi said the company was now collecting waste from
collection centres set up by municipal corporation and transporting that
to processing plant. The situation has created problems before the
residents who have to walk to the primary collection centres of
municipal corporation to dump the garbage. Tripathi said the
door-to-door collection has been stopped also in Varanasi because of
delayed payments.
Meanwhile, Principal Secretary of Urban Development C B Paliwal said
that he has sought a report on the issue from Kanpur Municipal
Corporation. “I have received a letter from A2Z stating that it has some
finance-related problems, and it has stopped door-to-door collection of
garbage in Kanpur. I have sought a report from Kanpur Municipal
Commissioner in this regard and matter would be solved very soon,”
Paliwal said.