Bhubaneswar: To improve service delivery to citizens, the housing and urban development department has set benchmarks for the municipal corporation and asked it to achieve those in the next one year.

The benchmarks for the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation have based on the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission. Achieving the guidelines will enable the civic body to get an additional incentive from the government.

"It is a regular practice, however this time we have set benchmarks for the corporation that are a bit stringent. This has been done keeping in view the increasing urban stature of the city. The civic body has been asked to follow it and achieve the benchmark to avail of additional financial assistance from the government," said an official of the department.

The services where the benchmarks have been set include drinking water supply, sewage management, solid waste management and storm water drainage system.

Besides setting the benchmarks, the government has ascertained previous service delivery status of the city where in most cases the civic body has failed to show any improvement.

According to the report card, in case of water supply the city administration has achieved 20 per cent success in extending meter connection households. In case of consumer complaints, it has achieved and scored 40 per cent against a target of 100 per cent. When it comes to cost recovery in water supply, it scored 20 per cent.

In case of sewage management, coverage of toilets in the network has been 50 per cent of the target.

For sewage connection and sewage treatment, the civic body has achieved 25 per cent and 70 per cent of the targets, respectively. The administration has not been able to achieve cost recovery of sewage management.

"We have constantly been trying to improve the service delivery to the citizens. However there are certain areas where we need improvement. A number of water supply projects are on anvil. Similarly, underground sewage network and three sewage treatment plants are coming up," said mayor Ananta Narayan Jena.

The civic body has also failed in its management of solid waste. Similar, it has failed miserably in waste collection, segregation and its scientific disposal.

In the last monsoon, the city had witnessed five incidents of waterlogging and yet only 17 per cent of the target in managing storm water drain network has been achieved.

"I am not happy with the city's sanitation facilities. They do collect the waste but there is no guidelines regarding dumping those," said Acharya Vihar resident Bhanu Dash.