Chennai: At a time when garbage collection and its management has taken a beating, the civic body is slowly and steadily implementing battery-operated vehicles for collecting waste from places like Perungudi, Shollinganallur and parts of OMR and ECR.
The move has brought happiness not only to residents but also to conservancy staff.
The initiative is being implemented under the Swachh Bharat Mission. A source with the civic body said, “This is a good initiative on several levels. First, it is environment friendly and is being done based on source segregation. I hope it is soon adopted at other zones in the city. Zone 13 in the neighbourhood is almost ready with compost pits, and residents have also started segregating waste.”
The neighbourhood areas have a total of 1,092 conservancy workers. Earlier, there used to be 903 bins and 208 tricycles for the job. With the introduction of battery vehicles, the bins kept on roadsides are slowly being removed. As of now, 210 bins have been removed, and instead of the tricycles, the garbage is being collected in battery-run vehicles.
Initially, the civic body began implementing the project with 15 such vehicles, and now at places like Perungudi and Shollinganallur, 15 more of these are being used. An amount of Rs 30 lakh was spent for buying theses additional vehicles.
According to reports, earlier, a single tricycle was used to collect waste from 250 houses, but now the new vehicles can each cover 400 houses. As far as residents are concerned, they are happy that the garbage is being collected efficiently and regularly without any delay.