After a spate of holidays that saw the level of civic sanitation deteriorate in the State capital, the Municipal Corporation of Dehradun started clearing waste accumulated in different parts of the city on Friday. However, Dehradun Mayor Vinod Chamoli has stressed that the MCD alone can not ensure the desired level of sanitation without public participation.
The first week of October saw a spate of holidays that negatively affected the level of civic sanitation in Dehradun which generates more than 200 tonnes of solid municipal waste every day. The MCD elicited a lot of criticism for piles of uncollected garbage in public places. However, on Friday the corporation resumed garbage collection. According to the Dehradun Mayor, even while continuing to face the problem of sanitation staff shortage, the MCD is doing its bit to maintain civic sanitation in the State capital. “Maintaining sanitation and ensuring the success of Swachh Bharat mission cannot be accomplished without public participation. The people also need to dump garbage only in designated spots. They should make sure that they use the door to door garbage collection service. When it comes to the dumping of garbage in vacant plots, the problem we are facing is that there are no proper records of such vacant plots. In order to overcome this problem, we have also made provision for assessment of vacant plots for property tax so that the corporation has details about such plots which in turn will help the MCD in taking action against dumping of garbage in such plots,” he said.
It is worth mentioning here that apart from the door to door collection of garbage, the MCD has also deployed six tractor trolleys to maintain sanitation. However, observers point out that factors like staff shortage prevent the corporation from doing its work effectively. Even the anti-polythene drive started some time back appears to have lost steam with the use of the banned polythene bags picking up once again in the State capital.