With most of its garbage disposal vehicles in working order, the Municipal Corporation of Dehradun expects to further improve the level of civic sanitation in the State capital in the coming days. Though the corporation continues to face a shortage of sanitation workers, municipal officials reckon they will be able to do the needful to tackle the increase in garbage generation due to new year celebrations.
Talking to The Pioneer, the senior municipal health officer Dr Kailash Gunjyal said that about 80 per cent of the various vehicles used by MCD for garbage disposal are presently operational. He said, “Earlier, the MCD dumper placer trucks used to be towed to Saharanpur for repairs but now we get the mechanics to visit our workshop to repair such trucks. Of the total eight dumper placers in the MCD, seven are presently operational while four more are expected to be procured in the near future. We have improved enough to achieve a considerable increase in the number of rounds made by the dumper placers in a day,” he said.
Apart from the dumper placers about 47 four-wheel mini trucks are also operational for door to door collection of garbage. However, shortage of workers continues to affect the sanitation tasks of the corporation. At present about 90 persons including contract workers are working in the municipal waste disposal task. Though the corporation was hoping to augment the number of its staff especially for maintaining the desired level of civic sanitation, presently there is nothing to indicate an imminent augmentation in number of sanitation workers. However, two mechanical excavators are slated to be procured by the corporation in the coming days. The corporation expects that its routine garbage disposal task will improve further in the coming days with a special sanitation campaign slated to be undertaken next month on the directions of the chief secretary Shatrughan Singh.
It should be mentioned here that about 300 tonnes of solid municipal waste is generated in Dehradun city every day. Out of this about 150 tonnes is disposed of by the corporation. Observers point out that various factors like unplanned constructions, inadequate resources and absence of civic sense in the general public make the facilitation of sanitation more challenging in Dehradun.