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Engineers to face action for lapse

The opposition also shot off a letter to lieutenant governor Naje... Read More
New Delhi: The spat between North mayor Ravinder Gupta and leader of the house Yogender Chandolia over

waste

disposal contracts escalated on Wednesday with the latter writing to the BJP state president Satish Upadhyay alleging corruption and demanding a CBI inquiry into the issue.
The opposition also shot off a letter to lieutenant governor Najeeb Jung demanding an independent inquiry. North commissioner PK Gupta said that disciplinary

action

will be taken against the three

engineers

of the auto department for giving misleading figures to the mayor.
The mayor's contention that waste could be disposed in just Rs 500 per tonne was based solely on transportation costs given by the auto department. It did not take into account cost of employing labour, equipment required for complying with the environment regulations mandated by NGT, the Supreme Court and the Manual Scavenging Act.
North Corporation's department of environment management services additional commissioner Deepak Hastir said that documents provided by the engineers mention that the figures do not include the dhalao attendants' pay and maintenance charges. The report has, thus, misled the mayor.
"Action will be taken against the officials for insubordination. Any information that the mayor demands has to go through the commissioner. By sidelining the commissioner and not taking other departments into consideration, the report has become one-sided and misleading. This led to the rates quoted by participants in an open tender getting challenged and causing such a huge controversy," Hastir said.
The report sent by the engineers to the mayor said that garbage transportation cost in Narela zone, where the corporation itself undertakes operations, is Rs 566.89 per metric tonne. Garbage transportation by hired trucks would cost Rs 544.93 per metric tonne.
Top Comment
Sridhara Mrvenkataramiah
3164 days ago
#WASTEMANAGEMENTContracts for waste disposal and corruption therein and spat thereof are too obvious a prospect. Blaming engineers is another cliche. This is not unique to New Delhi; some years ago the High Court of Karnataka had become rather exercised over this waste disposal issue in Bangalore and asked for credible quantification of accumulated and disposed waste; and not much is heard about this issue subsequently.The quantum of waste accumulated steadily increases as prosperity and consequent consumption increase---packaged materials yield a wide variety of waste, sachets, bottles, bags etc. Or, per capita generation and varieties of waste are far more and increasing now than what it perhaps was 5-10 years ago. The administration has to be geared for this dynamic eventuality. #Transportofwaste will have to be a specialized task needing ever new methods of vehicular structure and transport. Sewage waste containing quite a complex of contents will have to be dealt with in specialized ways including #biotechnologicalmethods. #Bio-medical waste is all the more hazardous and has to be doubly carefully dealt with.As waste disposal quantum and complexity increase, waste dump yards have to be administered methodically after choosing the location carefully; thorough norms and maintenance parameters have to be determined. Measurement of waste generated and transported has to be rather indirect; measurement of distance traversed by waste transport vehicles, the volumes incident in dump yards, measurement of the quantum of recyclable waste etc., are all the parametric determinants. These complexities therefore show that this waste administration business is quite serious and growingly technical and specialist. Waste management is thus becoming a highly specialized area of #urbanmanagement.In bigger and metropolitan cities, scores of them coming up in the country, waste dumping has concomitantly destroyed water bodies, spelling another dimension of #urbandisaster. This dumping has cared much less than little for the topography of the region resulting in the well known and well recognized extinction and shrinking of water bodies. This extinction has reduced net potable water availability in the country; the unintelligent protagonists of bigger river valley and dam projects have been advocating big spending and longer canals, irrigation and urban water supply projects ignoring the issue of decentralized conservation and harnessing of rain water and the prospect of destruction of the country's virgin forests, and the attendant rise in climate temperatures, destruction of coastal areas and sea level rise.Since the urban population is increasing fast along with centres of urban administration complexities, formal waste services with all modern appurtenances have become crucial. Technically, investments and training of due personnel and their deployment have to be unprecedented and huge; this is a new area of development in India. Jai Hind!
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