INDORE: Indore district collector Manish Singh on Thursday said political support, along with human and techbased interventions, was important in making the largest city of Madhya Pradesh the cleanest in the country.
Singh, also the erstwhile commissioner of the Indore Municipal Corporation, was speaking at the annual general meeting of the Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Agriculture (MCCIA) here. Indore has been consistent in being ranked India’s cleanest city in the annual Swachh Bharat survey.
He said consistent issues at every level of the waste collection, transfer and disposal process had initially made Indore one of the dirtiest cities in India, when the survey started in 2014-15. “There were over 2,000 open garbage dumping areas due to issues with the daily waste pickup from homes. We were getting summoned by the high court due to numerous PILs on garbage. But when we started to solve the issue, we got political support from the mayor, MLAs and city MP Sumitra Mahajan,” Singh said.
“All the efforts — procurement of vehicles, hiring of staff and setting up a plan for dividing the fleet for the kind of waste they would be used for, assigning beats and overseers for the staffers for monitoring and recording attendance — were inhouse,” he said.
Tech-based interventions also helped track the vehicles and tally the waste sent to the disposal facility, he said. “We are building a bio-methane plant with cooperation with a German firm. It will generate bio-CNG from processing wet waste. The bio-CNG will be used to run the city’s bus fleet,” Singh said.
