MARGAO: Wednesday was Margao Municipal Council’s (MMC) first deadline to act against the garbage menace and stink that plagued the town during the council’s five-year tenure. Last week, Herald mobilized the entire Margao force, including advocate-turned activist Rajeev Gomes, Melwyn Fernandes, seafarer Dixon Vaz, Croydon Medeira, Rashid Sousa and a hundred others, and set deadlines for the MMC to clean up its act.
We had set a deadline of July 1 for the MMC to convene an extraordinary councillors’ meeting to find a solution to the door-to-door garbage collection and sorting of garbage. A deadline of August 1 was set to lay a 100-percent tarpaulin cover on Sonsoddo’s humongous dump.
Gomes, Dixon and others on Wednesday gheraoed MMC Chairperson Arthur D’Silva and Chief Officer Y B Tawde and presented a memorandum on the deadlines set at the Herald/HCN ‘Battle for Margao’ debate. They demanded action based on the deadlines.
The chairperson was quick to pacify the crowds in his cabin and assured a notification calling for a meeting within two days, and for an MMC extraordinary meeting in the next seven days. He also assured to tender and put the tarpaulin cover in the next 22 days.
“I am doing the best I can to look into the garbage menace and streamline the process. Activists pop up when elections are round the corner, but we as councillors have been doing our job since day one in cleaning up Margao,” asserted Arthur.
Meanwhile Gomes told the media, “If the MMC doesn’t meet its deadlines, my next step is to mobilize all residents around Sonsoddo, bring cans of the leachate flowing into the gutters and ground water, and throw this leachate on the MMC’s doorstep. Let the councillors smell the stink then.”
Dixon asserted that this was a people’s movement, and as such, couldn’t have people speaking out from behind phones and Facebook profiles. He urged them to join the fight in large numbers for a cleaner Margao.
