Household waste stinks up port city
Dumping of domestic waste just outside households in the open is ruining Chattogram's city's environment, but it would be unfair to blame residents of the port city alone.
Rather, for reasons related to urban management, this kind of indiscriminate waste dumping becomes a compulsion for them due to the unavailability of better solutions.
For one, the conservancy workers i.e. waste management staffers tasked with waste collection, do not visit households every day. To make it worse, street dogs, cats, and crows fiddle with and spread the trash around, creating an unclean and unhygienic atmosphere throughout the city.
During a recent visit to different areas -- including KB Aman Ali Road at West Bakalia, Rahattar Pool Ujir Ali Shah By-lane, Surson Road, Askar Dighir Par and DC Road areas -- this correspondent saw that domestic waste wrapped in polythene bags were kept on roads or just in front of houses, which were then spread around by local animals.
Ujir Ali Shah By-lane area's Ali Hossain could not suppress his frustration. "CCC conservancy workers used to come to our house every day. But since the onset of the pandemic, the number of visits has come down to thrice a week," he said. "From January, they've been coming twice a week."
"I don't know whether CCC has cut down on staffers," said Ratul Barua, a resident of the Teachers' Training College area at KB Aman Ali Road. "Earlier, authorities removed dustbins in a bid to collect wastes from door to door. But with conservancy workers coming twice or thrice a week -- as if almost at their whim -- where exactly do we go with our trash?"
Sources told this correspondent that CCC started the door-to-door waste collection programme on January 2017. To this end, it distributed over 9,00,000 bins to the city's households so that waste can be kept there until conservancy workers come pick it up.
To ensure the programme's success, over 2,000 conservancy workers have been appointed, all on a daily wage basis.
Concurrently, the city corporation also started disposing public dustbins, with almost 90 percent of the 1,350 open dustbins and 96 container dustbins in the city having already been removed.
Apart from CCC's conservancy department, local ward councillors are charged with supervising conservancy workers. However, as the CCC polls got pushed back from its due date in last March due to the pandemic, some administrative difficulties also came into play.
The polls were held on January 27, and the new elected mayor and councillors took oath on Thursday.
Contacted, CCC Chief Conservancy Officer Shafiqul Mannan Siddique said there are supervisors in every ward to monitor the programme.
Told of the allegations of negligence, he said, "I am going to ask the supervisors about the matter. No false play in duty will be tolerated."
CCC Chief Executive Officer Kazi Mohammad Mozammel Haque told The Daily Star, "It is by no means acceptable for workers to not fulfil their task regularly, especially given that they're paid for each day's work."
Contacted, newly elected mayor Rezaul Karim Chowdhury told this newspaper on Thursday that he will look into the matter after formally taking charge.
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