FOR 2ND YEAR, NAVI MUMBAI SCORES FIVE STARS FOR BEING GARBAGE-FREE
For the second year in a row, Navi Mumbai has received a five-star rating for being a garbage-free city and is the only city from Maharashtra to make it to the Swachh Survekshan list this year. The list was announced by Union Minister of Housing and Urban Affairs Hardeep Puri on Tuesday. The city had been ranked seventh in the 2019 edition of the cleanliness survey.
Other garbage-free cities on the 2020 list are Ambikapur, Rajkot, Surat, Indore and Mysuru.
The use of technology and 100 per cent garbage pick-up were the factors that clinched the two-time feat for the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation (NMMC) and it is no mean achievement, considering that the city generates around 700 million tonnes (MT) of garbage per day.
Earlier this year, a Central team visited the city thrice, to survey garbage collection, transportation and disposal. A senior official from the solid waste management department of the NMMC said that a third-party team appointed by the Central government examined documents, paid surprise visits to various spots, inspecting cleanliness and waste segregation measures. The teams also interacted with the locals and learnt their views. “The city has been conferred the five-star rating after such a comprehensive survey,” said the official.
Tushar Pawar, deputy municipal commissioner (solid waste management), said that the NMMC has a robust system of tracking each and every bin in the city. "We have affixed microchips to every bin in housing societies and use GPS tracking. We hardly receive complaints from housing societies about non-lifting of garbage," he said.
The civic body uses technology to track the movement of garbage collection vehicles and ensure timely lifting of waste. It has provided around 22,326 collection bins embedded with microchips to industrial units, societies, commercial complexes and educational institutions across the city. Waste trucks go on their rounds every eight hours.
“All these trucks are equipped with RFID chips, GPS and GPRS and their movement, route and location are tracked through an app,” informed another civic official. "Further, the route of every vehicle has been uploaded on the official website for public access. Housing societies can thus obtain the arrival time of these trucks and ensure trash pick-up,” said the official.
The NMMC municipal commissioner, Abbasaheb Misal, has said the credit for this achievement goes to citizens as well as public representatives, who know the importance of cleanliness and support the administration when it comes to garbage management.
The Star Rating Protocol was launched by the Union ministry in January 2018, to institutionalise a mechanism for cities to achieve garbage-free status and motivate them to achieve higher degrees of cleanliness.
Puri said “Five years ago, we introduced Swachh Survekshan (SS), the annual cleanliness survey for urban India that has proven immensely successful. However, since it is a ranking system, several of our cities, despite doing exceptionally well, were not being recognised appropriately. The ministry, therefore, devised the Star Rating Protocol for garbage-free cities - a comprehensive framework where each ward in every city must achieve a certain standard across 24 different components of solid waste management (SWM) and is graded based on overall marks received”.
The protocol has been devised in a holistic manner which are critical drivers for achieving garbagefree cities.
While 698 cities cleared the desktop assessment, 141 cities have been certified with Star Rating during field assessment. “The low number of certifications signifies the rigorous and robust certification mechanism of the protocol” said Durga Shankar Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA.