Bhubaneswar: Following the dismal ranking of Odisha towns in ‘Swachh Survekshan 2019’, the state housing and urban development department has planned to double down on the issue of solid waste management to improve rankings in next year’s survey.
The department held a regional workshop in the city which saw participation from all the urban local bodies of the state.
The workshop was attended by Vinod Kumar Jindal, national mission director of Swachh Bharat Mission who had two important suggestions for the state. “If Odisha wants to improve its rankings, it has to get the Open Defecation Free (ODF) ++ tag for all its participating cities. Segregation of the waste will solve 95 per cent of the problem that we have with solid waste management,” said Jindal.
Jindal also stressed on the need of engaging the sanitation workers and providing them with incentives for cleaner cities. “All the safai karamcharis should be given identity cards, provisions of free health check-ups and education. And the ‘Swachh Nagar’ app will help the ULBs to digitally monitor construction & demolition waste, horticulture waste and animal waste,” he added.
Meanwhile, Berhampur is the sole city in the state that has an ODF++ certification.
According to the ODF protocol, a city can be notified as ODF if there is no open defecation at any point of the day in the city. A city is notified ODF+ if it ensures that all the public toilets are functional and maintained all the time.
A city can apply for the ODF++ tag if it has an efficient fecal management system where the treatment of the fecal sludge is taken care of.
Housing and urban development minister Pratap Jena said the Swachh Survekshan is not just a program but a movement where every citizen has to participate.
“The most important aspect is how many people we will manage to sensitize and the door to door collection of segregated waste. Also, within the next three months, we plan to have micro composting centres in all the cities. By 2020, all the 114 urban local bodies will have septage plants. We also plan to collect septage from each and every household in a mechanical way,” said Jena.
It may be mentioned here that none of the state’s five cities that participated in the 2019 survey featured in the top 100 list. Berhampur was the best performing city of the state having secured 216th rank among the 4237 cities across the country that participated last year. Bhubaneswar was ranked 288, while Puri, Rourkela and Cuttack were in 339, 353 and 374 positions respectively. Bhubaneswar’s rankings continue to slip since 2016 with the subsequent inclusion of more cities in every survey.