Swachhta tips: From distant Indore, Ludh MC’s focus now closer home

Ludhiana: After visiting distant cities like Indore to get clues about Swachhta tips, the MC is now learning lessons from nearby Mullanpur municipal council, which is just a few kilometres away from the city. Officials claimed that in the coming month, Swachhta Survekshan is going to take place, and if they visit any city that has excelled in sanitation or other arrangements, they can get 100 marks. Mullanpur Dakha MC was awarded the Swachh city title in January 2024 for its solid waste management. But the question arises: when Ludhiana MC and Mullanpur have no comparison, will they implement anything from there or just visit it like other major cities and get the marks? If authorities did not learn from major cities that had some similarities with an industrial town, then what will they learn from this small neighbouring town?
Senior MC officials, while requesting anonymity, shared that Mullanpur Dakha has 15 wards, and total solid waste generation is somewhere around 5 metric tons per day, while the industrial town generates between 1,000 and 1,100 metric tons per day. The industrial town has 95 wards, and conditions are not similar. He claimed that 1 ward in MC Ludhiana is larger than the entire Mullanpur town. He shared that Mullanpur got the water+ tag, while Ludhiana MC is ODF+, and this year they will try to get ODF++. "In Mullanpur, while they checked their arrangements, for keeping the waste segregated they made pits, and it is successful. If we have to adopt anything from there, then we can implement it ward-wise," he said, adding that the primary purpose is to get marks, and authorities will decide about implementation. The Swachhta Survekshan teams will visit the city next month, and officials are now completing their documentation.Many visits but no resultsTo learn solid waste management tips, the civic authorities planned several trips to other cities in the past 3 years, but there is hardly any output. In June 2019, the team went to Vellore, Tamil Nadu, to learn waste management and door-to-door rubbish collection, but not a single thing was implemented in the city. Then, in October 2020, 1 team went to Indore (a city which is ranked 1st in every Swachhta Survekshan) to learn waste management and other steps taken by Indore.In October 2020, another team went to Jodhpur to learn techniques used by Jodhpur MC to tackle dead animals and construction and demolition waste. However, the C&D waste plant is still under construction, while the carcass utilisation plant could not be made operational. Then, in June 2021, officials visited Chennai to review the solid waste management system being adopted by them. n July 2021, the MC team went to Okhla, South Delhi, and Bewari in Rajasthan to observe solid waste management. The officials were impressed with the Okhla model, where electricity was generated from rubbish. Based on that trip, 1 detailed project report was prepared, and authorities proposed generating 9 to 10 MW energy from garbage, as the city generates around 1,100 to 1,200 tons of garbage from households daily. However, the proposal remained on paper only.