Team Herald
MARGAO: The door-to-door garbage collection introduced by the Margao Municipal Council about two-and-a-half year ago is crumbling as it is neither implemented nor monitored properly with the labourers engaged ruling the roost and the sanitation department claiming helplessness.
What is truly disappointing is that the State capital Panjim very successfully switched over to door to door garbage collection years back, but Margao Municipal Council has failed to lift any leaf from their neighbouring city.
While in Panjim the dry and wet waste is collected separately, in Margao the labourers mix all the waste in the big bins they roll around thereby making the whole exercise of segregating waste at source a futile exercise.
Sanitary Inspector Viraj Aravekar argued that the then Panjim Municipal Council had the support of NGOs that undertook the task of creating awareness on garbage segregation and collection amongst the people, besides Patricio Pinto who is personally interested in garbage management was a corporator.
Besides, he said, since initially the door to door garbage collection was done through self help groups, they failed to instill the required discipline amongst the people to hand over only segregated waste and pointed out that the self help groups were akin to a NGO which failed in Margao.
The staff employed for the door to door collection is also meager as presently there are only 96 workers employed in the five sectors that the 25 wards of Margao Municipal Council area have been divided. It would be pertinent to note that the Sanitation Department had asked for 250 labourers considering that there would be about 20 per cent absenteeism as the workers would be handling dirty things and be susceptible to infection.
Even in the 96 workers currently employed, enthusiasm for their work is minimal given the nature of the work and some of them prefer to do odd jobs like swapping and even laundry for the households from where the collect the waste.
One of the reasons for low enthusiasm is that these labourers are paid at the rate of Rs 325 per day which is considered very low given the fact that daily wage labourers standing every morning behind the Municipal Council building are paid Rs 500 per day although employment is not guaranteed every day.
The Margao Municipal Council is now relying upon the private contractor to whom the household garbage management will be outsourced, to put everything in place and have a proper system to collect deal with the waste.
