Two months after the sanitation workers called off their 12-day strike leading to huge pile-ups of garbage all over the city, Delhi’s streets are still strewn with the trash.
MCD sanitation workers’ claim to have cleaned the trash, but a look at city’s condition by The Pioneer shows that garbage thrown during the protest is still stinking on the streets.
People are greeted with the stench in areas like Patparganj, Yamuna Vihar, Okhla, laxmi Nagar, Pandav Nagar, Geeta Colony, Shahdara, Durgapuri as the workers only cleaned the roads leaving aside the heaps of garbage.
Garbage pile-up was also seen near Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg, Civil lines, Karol Bagh and Nizamuddin. East Delhi was the worst-hit as it made it difficult for passers-by to walk through.
The strike has left behind it an uphill task of removing heaps of garbage during 12 days. If the numbers are anything to go by, around 8,600 metric tonnes of waste is generated daily and the sanitation workers will have to clean up 1,03,200 metric tonnes of waste. The three municipal corporations have 65,000 sanitation workers, 1,500 dhalaos, 500 trucks and thousands of auto-dippers in place to keep up the sanitation services daily.
Poor monitoring of garbage lifting by private agencies, unavailability of landfill sites and excessive delay in completing solid waste management plants have cost Delhi dearly. While the daily waste generation is increasing manifolds by the day, municipal corporations have not been able to chalk out a strategy to deal with the daily dumps.
Rajender Mewati, Secretary of United Front of MCD employees said that they have not been paid salaries for the last two months. “The next court hearing on this matter is on March 29. We can’t defy the court order but if we are not paid salaries then we will resort to strike.”
Nearly eight years ago, erstwhile MCD had outsourced the sanitation work to private agencies for better waste management but in vain. Currently, nine of the 12 administrative zones have the door-to-door garbage lifting facility in place but still the civic bodies fail to maintain zero-garbage timings at its dhalaos or the local garbage dumping sites. The three corporations spend nearly Rs200 crore on private agencies for garbage collection but poor monitoring has not only resulted in monetary loss to the civic agencies.
How Delhi turned into the garbage capitalIJ
A little more than two months ago, the civic services in Delhi had come to a grinding halt. With nearly 1.5 lakh employees including 57,000 disgruntled sanitation workers on strike demanding due payment of their salaries and arrears, it seems like Delhi will not be able to breathe easy any time soon. The fresh release of Rs551-crore loan by the Delhi Government and Rs300 crore by lieutenant-Governor Najeeb Jung will bring the municipal corporations back to the square one.
As per the statistics, the city generates around 8,600 metric tonnes of municipal solid waste daily. The SDMC generates 3,200 metric tonnes of solid waste, NMC 2,800 metric tonnes and EDMC generates 2,600 metric tonnes.
At the outset are the demands of payment of due salaries in the first week of every month, release of arrears for those whose services were regularised in 2003 and 2004, regularisation of contractual workers, issuance of medical cards and the payment of their child education allowance. While the demands have not been complied with, the sanitation workers are battling grave financial crisis.
According to the rule book, if an MCD contractual worker has 240 days’ attendance for three years, s/he should be considered a permanent employee of the civic agency. The MCD, however, violated the norms and regularised the services of those appointed in 1996 later in 2003 and 2004. Not only this, the workers face health hazards at work when they are exposed to toxic gases inside sewer lines due to which they have demanded cashless medical facilities.
“The karamcharis are under deep financial crisis. There are so many of us who were forced to take loans as MCD had not paid for months. The Kejriwal Government had promised us due payment of salaries but everything went down the drain,” said Rajendra Mewati, General Secretary of United MCD Front.