Mangalore's waste e-monitoring goes to the bin

Most of the contractors are not uploading pictures of bins on the MCC website as required

Garbage bins in the city are ample proof of the prevalent use of plastics. A scene at S.L.Lobo Cross Road near a hospital on June 27, 2011. File Photo: R. Eswarraj

The Mangalore City Corporation’s bid to use technology to monitor whether or not contractors remove solid waste from public bins on a daily basis has come a cropper due to a lukewarm response from the contractors.

Three months ago the Corporation introduced the technology where the contractors are bound to take photographs of every bin both before and after clearing, and upload them on to the civic body’s website using a software available on their mobile phones.

It was publicised in the media that a green icon would appear against the locations where the bin had been cleared and a red icon would pop up on locations where garbage had not been cleared.

Sources in the Corporation told

The Hindu that there were 766 bins and containers and 25 vehicles pressed into service for clearing them daily. The civic body had distributed 25 mobile phones with pre-loaded software to eight contractors. The maximum number of photographs that gets uploaded on a given day is 43. Interestingly, only four garbage removal vehicles are showing compliance.

They said that though the contractors had been given training on how to upload the photographs many of them had not bothered to do it. The Corporation officials said that failure to upload the photographs did not mean that the bins or metallic containers had not been cleared daily. Some of the cleaners and drivers of the trucks said that they did not know how to do it. But introducing the new technology has not made any difference. Unless the civic body received specific complaints, the officials should believe that the bins had been cleared.On its part, the MCC too has failed to ensure compliance. Though the civic body could impose penalty on those who failed to upload the pictures the officials have not resorted to it as yet.