Jalandhar, January 02(Wsihav Warta): Swachh Survekshan-2018 will start on January 4 in Jalandhar. During the Swachh Survekshan of 2016, the Jalandhar Municipal Corporation was ranked 28th among 73 metro cities of the country. In 2017 survey of 434 cities, Jalandhar was at 233rd position. In this Swachh Survekshan this year, 4041 cities will be covered from across the country. However, on the basis of new wards, the election of Municipal Corporation Jalandhar(MCJ) has been done and the elected members are waiting for the swearing-in ceremony and the new mayor of the city is yet to be announced.
While it’s been two months since the new delimitation plan was notified, the MCJ is yet to redistribute the sanitation workers according to the newly constituted wards. But the department is continuing with old deployments. While the State Election Commission is yet to notify the appointment newly elected councillors, there has been no initiative taken by them to improve the sanitation condition of their newly allocated wards. To their utter surprise, many councillors were even found unaware of any such survey to be conducted in the city.
The marks to be given out of total 4000 marks in survey, over 1200 marks were kept for direct observation while 1400 marks will be granted on the basis of citizen feedback. With MCJ facing acute shortage of sanitation workers and machinery in the newly constituted wards, the city is unable to collect and process over 500 metric tonnes of garbage generated every day. With the closure of over 19 garbage collection sites in various wards in the past two months, the Swachh Bharat project appears to have been dumped for the last many months.The MCJ got Rs 3.71 crores under the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), it spent most of them in purchasing machinery for sanitation and did not spend much on the development of sanitation infrastructure.