The Hindu 26.09.2013
Waste e-monitoring goes to the bin
Most of the contractors are not uploading pictures of bins on the MCC website as required
The Mangalore City Corporation’s bid to use technology
to monitor whether or not contractors remove solid waste from public
bins on a daily basis has come a cropper due to a lukewarm response from
the contractors.
Three months ago the Corporation
introduced the technology where the contractors are bound to take
photographs of every bin both before and after clearing, and upload them
on to the civic body’s website using a software available on their
mobile phones.
It was publicised in the media that a
green icon would appear against the locations where the bin had been
cleared and a red icon would pop up on locations where garbage had not
been cleared.
Sources in the Corporation told
The Hindu
that there were 766 bins and containers and 25 vehicles pressed into
service for clearing them daily. The civic body had distributed 25
mobile phones with pre-loaded software to eight contractors. The maximum
number of photographs that gets uploaded on a given day is 43.
Interestingly, only four garbage removal vehicles are showing
compliance.
They said that though the contractors had
been given training on how to upload the photographs many of them had
not bothered to do it. The Corporation officials said that failure to
upload the photographs did not mean that the bins or metallic containers
had not been cleared daily. Some of the cleaners and drivers of the
trucks said that they did not know how to do it. But introducing the new
technology has not made any difference. Unless the civic body received
specific complaints, the officials should believe that the bins had been
cleared.On its part, the MCC too has failed to ensure compliance.
Though the civic body could impose penalty on those who failed to upload
the pictures the officials have not resorted to it as yet.
The corporation will begin imposing fines on those contractors who failed to upload the photographs.
