Just as referees blow whistles on a football field, Kolkata Municipal Corporation's sanitation workers have so far used whistles to alert citizens to dispose of garbage. From now on, citizens will be called every morning to dispose of household garbage with songs. According to an official of Kolkata Municipal Corporation's waste removal department, "A plan has been made to start music therapy for daily garbage collection. This has never been done in Kolkata before." The opposition, however, says there is a severe shortage of sanitation workers in every ward of the city. This eye wash by the Trinamool-run municipal board is to cover up that main problem.
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What exactly is the plan? An official of the concerned department of the municipality says loudspeakers will be installed in battery-operated garbage collection vans. Various awareness jingles about municipal services will be played. The jingles are currently being composed. Initially, this plan is intended to start with 25 vehicles. Later, there is a plan to allocate one battery-operated vehicle per ward. The municipal authorities argue that blowing whistles for garbage collection may seem monotonous to many citizens. An indifference has developed among them. New jingles may increase citizens' interest.
According to sources, a similar initiative had earlier been tried in a ward under the Baruipur Municipality, adjacent to Kolkata, and it received a positive response.
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While municipal authorities claim the entire initiative is innovative, the opposition says all these plans for garbage collection are actually a futile attempt to hide the shortage of workers, throwing dust in citizens' eyes. State BJP spokesperson and councillor of Kolkata's ward number 50, Sajal Ghosh, said, "Planning means commission games. There are over 40,000 vacant posts in the municipality. Workers engaged in garbage collection work under the 100-day scheme are not getting regular salaries. If there used to be 10 sanitation workers in a ward earlier, now it has come down to 4 in some places, 6 in others. Stories are being concocted to cover up all these failures and divert citizens' attention." CPI councillor of Dhakuria's ward number 92, Madhuchhanda Deb, said, "If adequate workers are arranged in each ward for garbage collection, there is no need for all this. What is needed is not jingles but increasing the number of workers for garbage collection."
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In response to opposition criticism, however, the mayor-in-council of the municipality's waste removal department and Trinamool MLA from Jadavpur, Debabrata Majumdar, claimed, "During the Trinamool-run municipal board's tenure, there has been tremendous improvement in the work of the waste removal department. Better work has been done than during any municipal board in the past."
