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| Heaps of garbage litter the toilet area on the ground floor of the RMC building in Ranchi; broken furniture blocks a stairway; a corner of a wall bears testimony to the onslaught of gutkha spit; and the exterior of the civic headquarters that is deceptively clean. Pictures by Hardeep Singh |
Cleanliness, like charity, begins at home. Not for Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) though.
The civic body, which kicked off a week-long cleanliness awareness campaign with a march from Albert Ekka Chowk weeks ago, does not practise what it preaches as its stinking office will tell you.
A visit to the RMC building revealed that the authorities could not care less about hygiene. Though executive president of Safai Mazdoor Sangh and RMC employee Bhagat Balmiki maintained that “as many as 10 workers have been deputed to look after cleanliness of the building,” the ground reality paints a dirty picture.
The walls of the four-storey building, where around 1,000 people come every day to pay taxes, get their building plans approved and register births and deaths, have fallen victim to spit-o-cracy. Gutkha or betel juice-laced spit has red-washed the walls and corners, while the area around the toilet has become a dumping yard.
The spaces outside the chambers of chief executive officer Vinay Choubey, mayor Rama Khalkho, chairman of public work committee Arwinder Singh Deol and town planner Gajanand Ram have not been spared either.
A vat was spotted outside the bathroom in front of the office of chairman of market and park advisory committee Sanjeev Vijayvargiya. Staircases double up as storehouse for broken and unused furniture while the floors look like as if they have not been washed for ages.
Deputy chief executive officer of the civic body Gopaljee Tiwari accepted that the building was dirty, but blamed the visitors.
“The visitors should be a little more responsible and abstain from spitting on the walls. In fact, once the decision to impose fines on such people was also taken, but it could not be implemented as it required adequate manpower to keep an eye on violators,” he said.
On the other hand, Choubey said that due attention would be given to cleanliness soon. “A tender will be floated for whitewashing the building soon. We will also make efforts so that the RMC building, which has not been painted for the past five years, looks good,” he said.
The RMC is responsible for maintaining cleanliness in as many as 54 wards of the state capital.
The cleanliness awareness campaign that it undertook in association with A2Z Waste Management Pvt Ltd — the private agency that has been roped in to collect waste from capital homes apart from disposing it — urged people to extend cooperation for keeping the city clean.
Is anyone listening?
