Clean-up act! BMC acts on 44,500 complaints received through Swachhta app

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) in order to improve Mumbai’s its ranking on the clean cities matrix of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan survey, which is to start from January 2018, appealed to citizens to download the Swachhta mobile application. Therefore, now civic officials claim that citizens have responded to their appeal and around 61,000 people down- loaded the app.

A senior civic officer admitted the app was launched one year ago, but due to lack of awareness only 5,000 members were using it and only 6,000 complaints were registered. The momentum and curiosity picked up after awareness campaigns were held in the last one month.

The BMC takes its mini van with sweepers to register residents from every ward. Now, thousands of people have downloaded the app and their complaints been addressed.

Earlier, in the center Swachh Bharat Abhiyan survey was conducted in 2017 with Mumbai’s ranking dropping to 29 from 10. The BMC attributed the downfall due to poor feedback submit- ted by the citizens, one of the three criteria in the evaluation process. Therefore, this time the civic body has focussed on its awareness campaigns so as to not to miss the opportunity and be on the top ranking position on the clean city matrix compared to other cities.

BMC also started a ‘feet-onstreet’ survey to get feedback on cleanliness and asked people to download the app to get the complain directly to the BMC Solid Waste Management depart- ment. According to civic officials, complaints about garbage lying on road were addressed within 12 hours. In addition, the complaint goes not only to the BMC control room but also an alert issent to the centre and in return centre officials see whether the complaint has been addressed or not and in what time.

According to BMC officials, various initiatives undertaken recently has seen 7,100 metric tonne less garbage collection.