GUWAHATI, July 23 - Though the State government has been spending crores of rupees through the Guwahati Municipal Corporation (GMC) to keep the city clean, Guwahati is yet to secure a good rank as a clean city of the country.
According to higher officials of GMC, in terms of maintenance of cleanliness, Guwahati is at present in the 303rd position among 600 cities of the country.
�We have a target to come in the top 20 positions within next year. For this purpose, we have taken a number of initiatives,� said GMC Commissioner Debeshwar Malakar.
As part of its various initiatives to keep the city clean, the GMC today declared that it would award Rs 500 to anyone who can send photographic evidence of violation of cleanliness norms by any person.
�To avail the reward, one has to send the photograph of the rule violator with the location of the incident. But the photograph should be clear enough to detect the face of the person who throws garbage at unauthorised places. We will keep the identity of the informer secret and will take his or her help to detain the rule violator,� Malakar said.
The rule violator will face penalty as per norms of the GMC Act.
The Commissioner asserted that to improve the position of Guwahati among other cities in maintenance of cleanliness, the GMC is now laying more stress on making the public aware not to dirty their areas, rather than carrying out extensive cleanliness drives.
It is noteworthy that the Union government confers ranks based on the use of the Swachhata App by residents of the city and the result of a field survey.
The GMC has also formed six flying squads for its six divisions to maintain cleanliness and the drainage system of Guwahati. Another duty of the squads is to remove encroachments from public places.
Each flying squad comprises six multi-purpose workers headed by an official of the rank equivalent to that of an executive engineer. As part of its strategy, the GMC has also fragmented each division into six parts for the convenience of the flying squad which will cover one part each working day of the week.
�Another duty of the flying squad will be to review the performance of the NGOs engaged by the GMC to carry out door-to-door garbage collection. For this purpose, the squad will carry out random survey in three households of a ward every month. Based on the output of the survey we will decide the amount of payment to be made to one NGO. We have taken the step because some NGOs show very poor results in collecting garbage though they earn around Rs 1 lakh per month as payment from us,� the GMC Commissioner said.
The GMC has deployed 31 NGOs to carry out door-to-door collection of garbage with the aim to segregate wet and dry wastes at source.
