Hoteliers not too happy with the scheme
MARGAO, DEC 30
The Margao Municipal Council has decided to revive the door-to-door collection of garbage from the city’s eateries, but the hotel owners have expressed their strong reservations about the scheme given the bitter past experience.
President of the South Goa small and medium hotel owners Association C P Jaggi had a meeting with the MMC Chief Officer Prasanna Acharya on Thursday and discussed the possibility of reviving the door-to-door waste collection concept.
While offering wholehearted support to the Civic body in its bid to ensure clear Margao, Jaggi made it amply clear to the Chief Officer that the scheme can turn out a success only if the Civic body collects the garbage fees from the hotel owners on a daily basis.
On the other hand, the Chief Officer maintained that it is impossible to collect the payments on a daily basis and insisted that the system can be streamlined if the hotel owners agree for the monthly payment of fees.
Says Jaggi: “The daily payment system is not at all acceptable to the hotel owners. We have seen in the past that there were occasions when the Municipal workers did not turn up to collect waste from the hotels for days together. We are ready to cooperate with the Civic body if the payments are done on a daily basis”.
He made it categorically clear that the hotel owners under no circumstances would pay the monthly fees because of the bitter past experience. “Hotel owners based on the category are ready and willing to pay the fees to the Civic body. But, the Civic body should first put a full-proof system in place”, he added.
The Margao Municipal Council had been unsuccessfully trying to implement the door-to-door waste collection from the hotels and other eateries over the years, but in vain.
The scheme was first implemented by the Civic body over a decade ago with private participation, but it met a natural death for want of support from the Municipality.
Ex-Chairperson Savio Coutinho had made a determined bid to put the mechanism in place, but scheme had to be abandoned even before its implementation on account of bureaucratic hurdles.
Plans to outsource waste collection from the hotels to private players in the last one year also failed to succeed.
