Dhenkanal: Bestowed with greeneries and natural beauties, Dhenkanal town is often dubbed as the ‘Ideal Town’. But as you enter the town’s limits, you will soon realise that the status is a misnomer.
The Dhenkanal municipality is spending crores of rupees to improve the sanitation, to add beauty to the town and, last but not the least, to give town dwellers a better environment to live in.
But the ground reality speaks a different story. As you enter the town, you will be greeted with piles of waste everywhere even in front of temples and government offices.
There are ‘Swachh Sathis’ to clean the town. Similarly, 20 battery-operated vehicles are engaged to collect garbage from every ward. These apart, there are municipality staff to collect waste making door to door visits. On an average, the municipality is spending Rs 1l akh for each ward.
In spite of all these arrangements, garbage heaps are sure to be seen at different locations lying uncollected for days.
Lalit Nagar in ward no-3 is mostly inhabited by municipality employees and they too are experiencing this problem. They have taken up the matter with officials on several occasions but to no avail.
Peep into ward no-23, there are plastic dustbins with covers here. But these bins can always be seen overflowing, making the areas insalubrious. Local residents allege that the bins are not emptied for days. Even if they inform the vehicles engaged for shifting garbage, they hardly turn up.
At the same time the civic body authorities claim that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they are taking utmost care to ameliorate the sanitation system in the town. The dwellers are being made aware of hazardous effects of piling up of garbage through public address system.
All these things are nothing but eye wash, local residents alleged.
When contacted, executive officer, Dhenkanal municipality Atanu Kumar Samant parried the question as to why garbage is not being shifted for days, saying he would look into the allegation.
PNN