GVMC officials met Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) officials in Delhi to lodge a grievance over the municipal corporation’s fall in rating from two stars to one star in the Garbage-Free Cities (GFC) Star Rating 2020 released recently.
GVMC Additional Commissioner V. Sanyasi Rao met SBM Joint Secretary V.K. Jindal and Director B.K. Jha in Delhi to raise the issue of the poor rating, and informed them that the results did not reflect the fact that the GVMC had a Construction and Demolition (C&D) waste plant functioning for the past one year.
“The SBM team assured me that they would look into the matter and seek an explanation from the third-party team which had conducted the survey in Visakhapatnam,” Mr. Sanyasi Rao said.
The SBM officials will check if GVMC has uploaded all the proper documents related to C&D plant during the survey, Mr. Sanyasi Rao said, adding that the civic body has uploaded all the details on the MIS portal.
“May 28 was the last day for the Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) to submit any grievances they had related to the ratings. Many ULBs have submitted complaints. Our grievance is a serious one. The MoHUA may revert to us in the first week of June,” he said.
The civic body has applied for a five-star rating in the GFC Star Ratings 2020. On May 20, the GVMC was awarded one star in the results, while Tirupati and Vijayawada secured three stars. The GVMC officials claimed that the third-party team appointed by the MoHUA which had come for inspection to the city did not even visit the C&D plant at Kapuluppada, as a result of which zero marks were allotted to the C&D waste rating.
Officials also claimed that they had received good marks for C&D plant parameter in the GFC ratings of 2019, when the plant had just started operations. But in the survey conducted in 2020, the civic body had ‘failed’ the survey though the plant is conducting full-fledged operations, they said.
