MARGAO: If the battle was lost for want of a shoe in olden times, the Margao Municipal Council’s pre-monsoon cleanliness work went down the drain due to want of rickshaws that resulted in the flooding of houses and roads in different parts of Margao.
MMC has prepared a team of 30 labourers who were sent to each ward to carry out the pre-monsoon works like cleaning and desilting the drains. The workers worked in each ward for two or three days depending upon the amount of work that was needed to be done.
However, the dirt removed from the drains was kept by the road side and could not be lifted immediately as the MMC does not have enough of vehicles to do that work. “We lost about three days cleaning the mess created at the SGPDA grounds by the Holy Spirit feast fair,” said Chief Officer Johnson Fernandes.
Admitting that there might have been some lapses and some of the cleared dirt might have gone back in the drain during the heavy showers which resulted in flooding in some areas, he however said if there were sufficient vehicles to transport the removed dirt, this situation would not have arisen.
MMC presently has three trucks and 8 rickshaws and all these vehicles are presently burdened with the garbage collection as the MMC wants to make segregated waste collection a success. “We had proposed to get two more rickshaws which when we get, the trucks will be used only to collect all the material related to monsoons like the cut branches and other waste,” Johnson said.
Earlier the MMC had outsourced the pre-monsoon cleanliness work, this year around the chief officer used only the MMC staff to carry out the work thereby saving money for the council. Two years ago the work was tendered for Rs 9 lakh.
MMC Vice Chairperson Tito Cardoso said that under the earlier system, labourers were taken in a rickshaw and whatever they cleared was dumped in the same rickshaw to be emptied, should not have been abandoned.
“That system did not keep the labourers free and they were working all the time either cleaning the drains or loading the vehicles,” he said while pointing out that presently the labourers are idle till the vehicle returns after emptying whatever dirt it was filled with.
