The Greater Chennai Corporation, hereafter, will not pay contractors based on the quantum of garbage collected, as officials found the present ‘Tipping Fee Model’ to cause continuous loss to the exchequer.
The Corporation is set to adopt a ‘Service Delivery Model’ for making payment for waste management to the contractors whose performance would be evaluated based on ‘key performance indicators’ clearly spelt out in the concession agreement, officials said. The contractors would be paid a monthly service fee on completion of work each month, subject to the degree of performance in waste management.
Exaggerating numbers
“The existing model induces a tendency from the concessionaires to increase weight of the waste collected. They may add construction debris to increase weight. This has led to complaints on irregular clearance of bins, inadequate sweeping of roads and poor door-to-door collection,” said a civic official.
In the ‘Tipping Fee’ model, the contractor collects waste from the neighbourhoods and transports it to the dumping site and is paid according to the “weight brought” at the gate of dump site. As per the present agreement, the contractor is paid 50% fixed cost on tonnage basis and the balance 50% based on weightage obtained through qualitative assessment and the quality of deployment of manpower and vehicles.
The Hindu had carried an investigative report in June this year — ‘Chennai’s garbage scam: making wealth out of waste’ — detailing how the contractors were passing off construction debris as solid waste and potentially swindling huge sums of money by increasing tonnage without actually clearing garbage on the streets.
In the new system, the contractors would lose revenue for poor performance. The Corporation has already finalised a list of tentative Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the evaluation of the performance of the contractors in conservancy operations.
This includes deployment of sweepers, march out of tricycles, clearance of bins, clean sweeping of roads/streets and centre median, coverage of households in door to door collection, regular cleaning of bins, spraying of insecticides in streets, spraying of insecticides around bins.
The indicators also include collection of segregated waste in separate containers, collection of bulk waste separately, full deployment of compactor vehicles for collection and transportation of waste among others.
