SHILLONG: The Shillong Municipal Board (SMB) has got a fresh lease of life in the last couple of months. The Board that has been a subject of public criticism is now working overtime to mend its ways.
Following the intervention of the High Court of Meghalaya and the National Green Tribunal (NGT), SMB is now striving to keep the city clean and a slew of measures have been taken in the past few months.
Now it is seen that the sweepers are working even in the evening up to 7.30-8 pm. A few patrolling teams of the board are on constant move picking up garbage from the city.
The board has now employed 397 people for waste management. Of them, 255 are for sweeping streets that is done in two shifts daily for main roads and commercial areas and one shift daily for locality roads and bylanes.
A waste management patrol was also introduced in April. The duty of the patrol – which comprises a supervisor, a collection vehicle and two workers – is to patrol the main roads and commercial areas and collect unattended garbage.
The Board informed that more than 52 violators have been penalised with fines of up to Rs 35,000. The names of some violators have been published in newspapers and pictures of some of them have been posted on social media as a warning to others. Even sweepers of SMB who were caught dumping waste in open spaces were fined.
A report from the Board informed that Shillong generates 135 MT of garbage daily of which 126 MT is collected by garbage workers. Dumping of solid waste in rivers and streams is practised by nearly 20 per cent households all along the rivers and streams.
“Only 70 per cent of the households have toilets with soak pits in the city. About 30 per cent of the households have toilets without septic tanks and all their liquid waste are directly discharged into drains and rivers,” the report added.
Meanwhile, the Board has now issued smart phones to all supervisors for convenience and real-time monitoring and reporting.
CCTV cameras have also been put up in several places where people throw garbage and heavy fines are imposed on defaulters.
SMB informed that municipality area has been divided into four zones and their teams are trying their best to keep the town clean.
Board officials said waste management is more organised and institutionalised in Municipal and Cantonment Areas and added that 70 per cent of this is covered by door-to-door collection.
“Except in commercial areas, intermediate waste storage has been done away with. Segregation at source was started in June 2015 in the entire municipality of Shillong with the involvement of local dorbars,” the Board said.
It was also informed that about 70 per cent residential households in the city are segregating at source and efforts are on to bring about full compliance before 2018. A composting unit has also been set up with funds from Swachh Bharat Mission to process segregated bio-degradable waste into compost during the interim period until the completion of the 170 TPD Compost Plant in 2019 and a sanitary landfill is being developed in two phases.
The first phase is completed and is ready for use. The construction of a 170 TPD compost plant has also started. A task force constituted for identification of a future processing and disposal site has submitted its report and recommendations.
In addition, the Board is also harping on creating massive awareness among the people through social media, besides conducting programmes and workshops for schoolchildren and Dorbar Shnong, among others.
