Waste clearance to be monitored online from june

Contractors will take photographs of bins before and after clearing them and upload them

An eight-month-old proposal of Mangalore City Corporation to monitor online the clearance of solid waste from metal and cement bins in the city daily will become a reality in the first week of June, said Commissioner Harish Kumar K.

The corporation officials and others would be able to see if the contractors have cleared the bins or not by logging on to www.cleanmangalore.org, Mr. Kumar told The Hindu .

The corporation has been working to make this proposal a reality since September 2012. A specific software and cell phones were behind this technology of monitoring, he said.

The Commissioner said that this cell phone-based technology had been implemented by Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation. The city corporation here was emulating the same.

Manjunath R. Shetty, Environment Engineer at the corporation, said that the trial run of the technology was under progress now.

He said that eight contractors collect solid waste from eight zones in the city using 30 vehicles daily. There are about 600 bins in the city. As per the terms of contract, all these vehicles have been fitted with the global positioning system (GPS) equipment by the contractors, which helped the civic body to monitor their movement.

Under the online monitoring system, contractors will take the photographs of all bins in their zones before and after clearing them and upload them to the website through cell phones. They get uploaded in the website within five minutes. The cell phones pre-loaded with software are ready and would be given to contractors soon, he said.

After the snaps are taken, a coloured icon with the real time photograph (with latitude and longitude) would appear on a pre-loaded map of the website with the location (called geo-reference stations) and date on the site. The red icon would indicate that the bin at the particular location has not been cleared and the green icon would indicate that it had been cleared.

Even if a contractor was not able to clear a bin on a given day, it would be mandatory for the contractor to upload the photograph of bins which have not been cleared daily.