Bhubaneswar, May 7: The housing and urban development department has constituted a 12-member task force to design, implement and monitor the sanitation promotion programmes in the city.
The city sanitation task force will work to attain the goals under the Swachh Bharat Mission and the Odisha Urban Sanitation Strategy, which aims to ensure better and healthy environment for citizens with streamlined cleanliness and awareness activities.
While the mayor will be the chairperson of the task force, the municipal commissioner will be the member-convener. The city health officer, an official of Public Health Engineering Organisation, one person from a women self-help group and a person from a city-based voluntary organisation will be among the members of the task force.
"We have constituted the committee with all possible stakeholders who could contribute to draw up plans to ensure better and cleaner environment in the city. It is high time we achieved goals of the Swachh Bharat Mission," said a housing and urban development department official.
Mayor Ananta Narayan Jena said they had already carved out a city sanitation plan and were working rigorously towards ensuring cleanliness with the help of various voluntary organisations and individuals. "The task force will expedite and streamline the process of ensuring sanitation in the city," said Jena.
"The task force will meet at least twice a month and chalk out plans as well as review the sanitary situation of the city with inputs from ground-level officials," said another official of the department.
The primary objectives of the Swachh Bharat Mission are to reduce and eliminate the practice of open defecation through construction of individual and community toilets.
The mission also takes the initiative of establishing a mechanism for monitoring the use of latrines and having proper civic sense.
In February, the civic body had held a stakeholder consultation workshop to come up with a city sanitation plan based on the findings from wastewater, faecal sludge management and solid waste management in the city. The stakeholders had reviewed the way things were done till then and had come up with a new city sanitation plan with special focus on faecal sludge management.
The new plan includes instructions on constructing septic tanks of the right size, release of wastewater in a safe manner, proper transportation of sludge and to ensure that surface or groundwater are not contaminated.
Besides the task force, the state government has also hired 22 sanitation experts, who will assist different urban local bodies of the state to ensure cleanliness.
"The government always forms committees and comes up with plans. But it fails to ensure ground-level implementation. I hope the plans work this time," said Nayapalli resident Mansi Hota.
