After helping Coimbatore improve its Swachh Bharat ranking by two places to 16, the City Municipal Corporation has set its sight on securing the top spot.
In the ranking the Central Government released on Thursday, it adjudged the city as the 16th cleanest in 2017. The Government ranked the city as the 18th cleanest in 2016.
From now on, the objective is to reach the top spot, Corporation Commissioner K. Vijayakarthikeyan said and shared on social networking sites his appeal to households to segregate waste and hand it over to conservancy workers in such fashion.
This year’s ranking is significant also because last year, the Government had ranked 75 cities and this year it was 434 cities, after including cities with over 1 lakh population. This meant more competition from cities with fewer people and lesser waste, Swachh Bharat Nodal Officers K.V. Thirumal and P. Senthilkumar pointed out.
To secure the 16th spot, city had scored 1,650 out of 2,000 marks. Last year the city had scored 1,361 marks.
Coimbatore, like last year, is behind Tiruchi that had scored 1,716 marks for the sixth spot. The Government had evaluated the cities for their service level and documentation – 900 marks, citizens feedback – 600 marks and independent observers’ visit – 500 marks (total 2,000). Coimbatore had scored 867 out of 900 for its service level and documentation, 431 out of 500 from independent observers’ visit and 352 out of 600 from citizens feedback.
The Government had made a change in this year’s ranking in that it had reduced from 1,000 to 900 the marks given for service level and documentation and increased the marks given for citizens feedback by 100 marks.Last year, the city had scored 678 out of 1,000 in documentation and service level, 376 from independent observers’ visit and 307 from citizens feedback.
Officials involved in waste collection in the Corporation say that however high the Corporation rated its service level, it had not been able to get a positive response from the people. Last year, the city had scored 307 out of 500 and this year 352 out of 600. And, this means that around 50 % of the people who responded to or voted on the Corporation’s waste management system were unhappy and the Corporation had a lot of work to do.
Focus on added areas
The Coimbatore Corporation that is gearing up for segregated waste collection in response to Central Government’s call ahead of World Environment Day on June 5, has identified what it needs for such collection.
Sources familiar with the preparation say that the Corporation has told the State Government that in the 100 wards, there are over 4.70 lakh households and of those it had implemented segregated waste collection in 52 wards.
By the end of this month, it would start collecting waste in segregated fashion in 40 wards and in the remaining eight by June.
The sources say that the Corporation needs to redistribute its workforce in such a way that added areas get more workers - at present the concentration of workforce in Central, North and West zones is high. The civic body should redeploy the workers to East and South zones and also to added area in North zone.
This will improve the workers’ waste collection efficiency - to the mandated 250 houses a worker norm. At present, the workers cover about 100 to 150 houses, where segregated waste collection is in vogue.
The sources add that as part of this segregated waste collection drive, the civic body will soon place across city bins exclusively for dumping wet/organic waste.
