After last year’s trial launch of segregation of waste at source in some wards failed to take off, the Mangaluru City Corporation is now making a move to re-launch the initiative.
This time it is to make it to the top among 500 cities and towns under Swachh Sarvekshana 2017, a cleanliness survey of the Union government to be conducted next year.
Of the total 2,000 marks under the survey, the government has reserved certain marks for implementing segregation of waste at source. The segregation of waste on trail basis was launched from April 2015 in the entire Court ward and some blocks of Bejai, Kodialbail, Kambla, Mannagudda and Derebail South wards covering 5,000 houses. Those areas had been chosen as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) had done some efforts there earlier on segregating waste.
Before launching this initiative, 15 official teams of the corporation went on visiting some houses in the six wards in the morning from March 19 to March 31, 2015, to create awareness. Notwithstanding the efforts, it did not yield the desired results.
Now as a first step of re-launching the move, the corporation has asked its contract agency collecting waste from doorsteps to train its workers first on how to collect segregated waste. The contract company has begun enlightening its workers now, a corporation official said.
The corporation would shortly chalk out a detailed plan on taking the re-launched plan to the people, the official said.
He added that the corporation might ask 84 vehicles collecting waste from source not to collect them if people did not give segregated waste.
According to an official a survey by the Union Ministry of Urban Development, Mangaluru was rated as the third cleanest among 476 cities across the country. The sanitation rating was for 2013-15 based on 19 indicators. Mangaluru scored 64.74 points. The rating measured the sanitation performance of cities on 19 indicators in line with the National Urban Sanitation Policy 2008. It was the second sanitation rating of 476 cities.
