One year later, Municipal Corporation of Manesar battling transfer of amenities

Officials of the Municipal Corporation of Manesar (MCM), which completed one year since its formation on Thursday, said that the civic body has brought about an improvement in sanitation and garbage collection in the area, even though it is still at a nascent stage. In contrast, roads and drainage infrastructure is still a work in progress, primarily due to the pending transfer of amenities, they added.

The Haryana government approved the proposal to form the MCM on December 23 last year, thereby making it the 11th municipal corporation in the state. Until then, Manesar relied on Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation (HSIIDC), Haryana Shahari Vikas Pradhikaran (HSVP), gram panchayat, and Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) in parts which share a border with Gurugram for its civic amenities.

Soon after its formation, the civic body’s first-ever commissioner, Vinay Pratap Singh, had said that the MCM team aimed at fixing sanitation and garbage collection issues across the city. “When we took charge of the MCM, each village merely had two officials for overseeing the garbage collection. Condominiums and societies had their own internal system. Many areas saw no garbage collection for more than two years too,” said Hariom Attri, joint commissioner of MCM.

The civic body’s first decision was to increase its manpower. “With only 79 sanitation staff assigned to us by the government, the MCM started collecting garbage from across the city and created a mechanism through which garbage collection, transportation, processing, and dumping can take place. We hired private contractors and increased the total sanitation staff strength to over 850 after we figured out the mechanism,” said Attri.

Roads in Manesar were cleaned for the first time in February this year, with the help of mechanised sweeping machines. According to Dr Ashish Singla, senior medical officer (SMO) and in-charge of Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM), the MCM officials carry around 200 tonnes of fresh garbage and 350 tonnes of legacy waste to a landfill in Bawal, located nearly 50 kilometres away, on a daily basis. Dumped waste lying at a location for more than a month is considered as legacy waste.

“We also identified bulk waste generators (BWGs) across the city and ensured guidelines for in situ composting there. There are at least 110 BWGs in the city, of which, 73 were served notices for not adhering to the rules. We have also sent a tender to the directorate of urban local bodies (DULB) to treat legacy waste within Manesar instead of Bawal,” said Singla.

The MCM aims to hire an agency and start door-to-door collection of waste in Manesar, set up material recovery facilities (MRF), and mass-scale composting units by mid-2022. While there has been progress in the sanitation and garbage collection process in the city, there is not much change in regards to roads and drainage so far, Attri added.

“A lot of roads and drains are still with other public bodies. Transferring of services is underway, and we are anticipating that by the end of 2022, bulk of amenities will be handed over to the MCM. Besides, we have just started the process of collecting property tax. We will have limited income to fix the roads and drains under the MCM area, so we need a steady revenue system,” said a senior MCM official privy to the matter, adding that only a dozen new drains and roads each were added in the city in 2021.

The Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG), which was formed in 2008, got most of the civic amenities only in 2013, after being transferred from the HSVP. The transfer process continued till early 2018. GMDA also took charge of the remaining master drains from the HSVP in 2018.

“The biggest problem is that there is still no clarity on which public body is managing which stretches. Residents do not know whom to approach… Until there is a proper demarcation, and areas are defined along with taking over of services, development will happen in the city in a haphazard manner,” according to Dharam Veer Singh, president of Mapsko Casabella RWA, Sector 82.