MARGAO: There’s no dearth of workers with the City Fathers for distribution of slips to the electorate at the time of elections, but none for the door-to-door waste collection program.
Margao city fathers have the men and well-oiled machinery, including manpower equipped with details of their voters, their place of residence and number of votes in each apartment. Sadly, the statistics did not come in handy for the MMC to streamline the door-to-door waste collection project, prompting the Solid Waste Management Cell to rope in 200 NSS volunteers from the city colleges – Chowgule, Damodar, Multipurpose and Rosary, to distribute bins to the households.
“Even if each councillor had to spare one of their experienced election workers to the municipality, the door-to-door waste collection exercise would have been on the right track by now”, remarked a member of the SWM cell.
In fact, members of the cell Savio Coutinho and Gunaji Desai conceded that the slow pace of distribution of bins is on account of the fact that the civic body distributes the bins after taking details of the occupants. “Since we have just a handful of workers, who are qualified to write and record these details, the distribution had progressed at a slow pace”, Both Coutinho and Desai said.
The duo said they had no option than to tie up with the NSS volunteers who will record details of the residents/occupants to whom waste bins will be handed. “These 200 NSS volunteers will go around the 40 housing complexes across the city and distribute the bins. We expect to distribute bins to around 3,000 households”, Coutinho said.
MMC Chairperson Gonzaco said that the civic body would complete the exercise of distributing bins to all the 40,000 city households by August 31.
On concerns expressed by senior citizens over the movement of door-to-door waste collection workers without uniforms and identity cards, Chief Officer Narayan Sawant said the civic body would soon provide the uniforms and ID cards to the casual workers engaged for the work.
The civic body admitted on Thursday that though the project was launched 13 days ago at the hands of Deputy Chief Minister Francis D’Souza, the desired progress is slower than expected, but hastened to add that this is perhaps the first time that an exercise of this magnitude is being taken up in the city.
