In six months, the Mangalore City Corporation (MCC) plans to collect segregated waste from each house in the city. It sounds ambitious, considering its earlier plan of collecting non-segregated garbage from doorsteps seems to have faltered midway.
A day after the Principal Secretary in-charge of Dakshina Kannada Bharatlal Meena directed the MCC to start collecting segregated waste within six months, its officials held meeting on Saturday to discuss how the proposal can be turned into reality. The MCC has decided to make an action plan to this effect in a few days, sources told The Hindu .
But the meeting brought into focus the issues faced in the ongoing door-to-door trash collection drive.
The contractors now collecting solid waste under eight packages in the city also attended the meeting. They said the door-to-door collection of non-segregated waste started from December 2012 has failed in many wards as people refused to pay a monthly fee of Rs. 30 fixed by the civic body to the waste collectors.
Nagarika Hitrakshana Samithi president G. Hanumantha Kamath said waste collectors were not going to all houses and collected garbage mainly from apartments and blocks of houses. People refused to pay as the collectors were demanding Rs. 50 monthly, he said.
Shreya, a homemaker at Vijaynagar, Padil said that nobody was collecting waste from the doorsteps in her locality. Roopa D. Bangera, councillor, Kadri North ward, said the door-to-door collection was not happening in Yeyyadi area. “In my ward it is 55 per cent success,” she said.
A corporation health official said it has only nine health inspectors against the 24 required to supervise 60 wards.
Hence, it was impossible to supervise the door-to-door collection in all wards effectively.
Cess
Linked to the fee payment is the issue of solid waste cess on property tax being collected since 2011-12 with the monthly minimum varying from Rs. 10 to Rs. 600. But it was suspended as the door-to-door collection of garbage had not taken off.
MCC Commissioner Ajith Kumar S. said the civic body is yet to take a final decision on how to effectively collect the solid waste cess.
