City cleanup drive from next week

The Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) begins a fortnightly cleanliness drive from next week, as per a prime ministerial directive to keep the city clean.

The decision was taken at a meeting at the Nagar Bhaban yesterday, with Mayor Sadeque Hossain Khoka in the chair.

Earlier on January15, at an inter-ministerial meeting, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia directed the DCC mayor to take immediate steps to clean the city.

Yesterday, according to sources, the mayor directed executive engineers and executive officers of 10 city zones, to involve local people in the programme to make it successful.

The mayor instructed that dustbins on the VIP roads should be cleaned out before office hours and citizen committees be formed to boost the cleanliness programme. He also stressed upon community-level waste management.

A DCC top official, who was at the meeting, told The Daily Star that the meeting however failed to chalk out any comprehensive strategy to manage solid waste.

In order to manage the huge amount of garbage produced everyday, a modern waste-management policy is required, he said.

According to various statistics, the DCC is able collect only 40 per cent of the 5,000 tonnes of garbage produced daily. The rest are simply littered in open spaces, surface drains and on roads.

With the hundreds of tons of uncollected garbage littered everyday, the city dwellers are daily facing the ordeal of health threatening public nuisance.

The meeting was told that now the DCC is suffering from different constraints including manpower and logistic.

The conservancy department of the DCC, responsible for the cleaning, is suffering from inadequate equipment as most of the garbage trucks are out of order.

The meeting was told that currently 100 trucks out of 242 do not function, sources said.

"Without repairing the trucks the DCC will not be able to observe the programme successfully," said a top official preferring anonymity.

The conservancy department operates with nearly 6000 street cleaners, 450 portable and 3000 concrete roadside bins. But there are widespread allegations that the cleaners do not perform their duties properly.

The issues of mosquito control, road repairing were also discussed at the meeting, meeting sources confirmed.

The meeting was also attended by DCC Chief Executive Officer AZM Shafiqul Islam and top officials of different departments of the DCC.