Bhubaneswar, Oct. 16: Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) has finally planned to adopt a zone-based plan for maintaining the city’s sanitation.

This is one of the ways, the BMC feels, streamline things with solid waste management plan going haywire.

The “collect-transport-dump model’’ of keeping the city clean has become not only old-fashioned, but sanitation contractors are also taking the advantage of the situation by carrying out solid waste lifting work based on the trips done by vehicles.

At times, even if garbage wasn’t collected from a particular locality of the capital, calculations and payments were made to contractors. But now, lifting of garbage will no more be the only criterion for payment to contractors.

“Now onwards, we will check whether garbage is being properly lifted from a locality or not. Till date, the lifting of solid waste from transit stations to the interim transit station and finally to the landfill site at Bhuasuni was calculated.

“In this method, there was no check to monitor whether the contractor was lifting the garbage piles from a particularly locality or from other spots,” said a senior BMC official.

On the other hand, regions across the city have different potentials for garbage generation. For example, official areas such as Secretariat and institutional areas such as various universities are having different garbage generation potentials than the Unit-I or Unit-II markets, as in the case of the latter, the garbage collection could be a couple of tonnes within a matter of hours.

But according to the calculations as per old BMC norms, a uniform parameter was being followed for every region for garbage collection. Now, the civic authorities have proposed to divide the city into five major zones — markets, institutional zones, residential zones, commercial zones and heritage zones. With different zones catering to different types of garbage, the contractors can have different approach to collection, piling and dumping of the same.

At present, the city generates 440 tonnes of solid waste everyday from 2,36,231 households. While street sweeping, primary collection and transportation has so far been privatised in 51 wards, the BMC is carrying out sanitation work on its own only in nine wards.

The civic body is also planning to use containers at transit transport stations for efficient collection of garbage as the people are not using dustbins properly.

“After so many campaigns, we are seeing that the public is not using the dustbins properly and wastes are found spilling over near the bins. We are planning to use small containers so that they can easily be transported to the interim stations.

“In future, the sanitation contractors will also be asked to campaign for better collection of garbage,” said another BMC official.

Chairman of BMC sanitation committee Seikh Nizamudin said: “This time, there will be scientific calculation even for collection of garbage. Population density will also be calculated for the solid waste management.”