Coordination committee to be set up

BHUBANESWAR: A coordination committee will be set up for a greater balance in the sanitation work of the city. This was decided at the review meeting of Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC), chaired by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Minister Sarada Prasad Nayak. It was the first time that the HUD Minister was conducting a meeting to review the working of BMC and the sanitation work of the city. Sources said Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik was insisting on a better and cleaner city and has asked the authorities to work for it. The sanitation is not the  responsibility of BMC alone, but the joint responsibility of Works Department, Public Health Engineering Organisation (PHEO), National Highway Authority of India and the Water Resources Department.  “A committee will be formed with the representatives of these departments and a meeting will be held to decide on how the sanitation system could be improved,” said BMC standing committee chairman Sheikh Nizamuddin. “The Works Department is paid for clearing the debris and construction material from the road, but that is not being done properly. The BMC needs to have a say over these departments as it faces people’s wrath if the cleaning work is not done properly,” added Nizamuddin.  The BMC has set itself one month deadline to achieve 100 per cent coverage in proper cleaning and sanitation. Right now the coverage is around 83 per cent. The BMC officials will make more rounds. The commissioner, sanitation inspector, sanitation and ward officers of the BMC will make rounds of the city five times instead of the usual three times a week.  On the other hand, even though the BMC has decided to privatise the sanitation work of 11 more wards, the corporators are protesting BMC’s decision to give a tender for sanitation to a company for seven years. “We do not want this. Seven years is too long a time to enter into an agreement with a company,” said ward 37 corporator Padmanav Das.