Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is making an effort to make the Mumbai city look clean and rank it better in Swachh Bharat Survekshan. It has floated a tender of Rs. 12.66 to clean dividers of the city’s roads for eight years.
According to Swachh Survekshan website, in 2019 survey, Mumbai city ranked to 49th among 425 cities in Swachh Bharat Survekshan. In 2018 Mumbai ranked to 18th. This year the rank has drastically slumped which indicates that the cleanliness of the city has taken a backseat for Mumbai municipality.
Swachh Survekshan website | Mumbai ranked 18
The BMC thinks because of filthy dividers of the roads, the city’s beautiful look gets faded. “We often see dirty medians (dividers) on almost all the roads in the city. From paan stains to garbage, the medians look unclean and spoil the look of the city. By washing them, we are likely to do better in the Swachh Survekshan rankings. We saw a demo of washing the dividers and decided to adopt the method after seeing the results,” told Vijay Singhal, additional municipal commissioner to Hindustan Times. Although, the total amount of the tender is Rs. 12.66 for eight years, Rs. 1.5 crore will be spend annually.
Swachh Survekshan website | Mumbai ranked 49
Since the tender is for a long-term, BMC wants to make sure that the machine that will be used to cleaning 250km divider of Mumbai roads is useful. “We can’t award a long-term contract with minimal knowledge about the machines. We have to be sure that the machines functional well,” an official told to Hindustan Times.
Although BMC thinks it is a better plan to make the city look clean and beautiful, but activists think the plan is waste of money and water. Gerson D’Cunha, convener of non-governmental organisation Action for Good Governance (AGNI) told to Hindustan Times that instead of cleaning dividers, BMC can improve our roads, repair the potholes and make other infrastructural changes.
On the other hand, Singhal told to Hindustan Times that dividers will be cleaned in an optimised manner, without unnecessary wastage of water.
