While Chief Minister Harish Rawat tried to present a proactive image by participating in the cleaning drive at Valmiki Basti for about two hours, questions are also being raised about the failure of the officials concerned to execute the CM’s earlier orders regarding sanitation and the need for deploying the police in sanitation and dengue awareness drive.
This is not the first time when the chief minister himself took to the field to participate in civic sanitation work. In the past, he had also joined a voluntary group of youngsters undertaking a sanitation work in the Nehru Colony area.
The Dehradun mayor Vinod Chamoli had then termed the chief minister’s actions farcical while stating that it was not the chief minister’s task to undertake cleaning work.
The chief minister should facilitate the necessary developments and assistance to the urban local body so that it may discharge its civic sanitation responsibility efficiently. Regarding the CM’s action on Monday, a senior official wanting to remain anonymous questioned the logic behind deploying the police for sanitation work and raising public awareness related to dengue.
“Instead of staging such periodic acts, the chief minister should have done the needful to expedite work on the solid waste management (SWM) project funded under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) which is yet to be completed about eight years after being launched in Dehradun,” said the official.
Observers opine that if the state administration had expedited work on the SWM project and taken stringent measures as per the law regarding garbage disposal, the level of civic sanitation in Dehradun and elsewhere in the state would have shown a marked improvement by now.
The SWM project which was launched in 2008 during the first tenure of Chamoli as the city mayor has been hampered by procedural and other factors at both the central and state levels. When necessary clearances were finally secured by the municipal corporation of Dehradun, groups of locals purportedly harbouring vested interests launched a movement opposing location of the waste treatment plant and landfill to be set up on about 20 acre land at Shishambada.
Recently, the CM had ordered a halt on work here taking cognizance of the opposition communicated by local groups. He had also assured the mayor that the location issue would be resolved soon. However, little progress has been made in this direction so far.