PESHAWAR, July 2: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Pervez Khattak has ordered the outsourcing of the sanitation services in the provincial capital.
The orders were issued to the local government and rural development department of late.
A senior LGRD official told Dawn on Tuesday that the decision to hire a private firm for sanitation work in the city had been made in light of the continued dereliction of duty by the relevant staff.
He said around 70 per cent of the sanitation staff had long been getting salary without performing duty and thus, leaving garbage piled up by the roads and sewers chocked.
The official said the capital city’s around 1,800 sanitation staff and machinery would be handed over to the firm to be engaged for sanitation services. He said the current Municipal Corporation of Peshawar and the erstwhile town municipal officers had miserably failed to bring the shirking sanitation staff to the field for cleanliness and maintenance.
The official said the process of outsourcing was in initial stage as terms and conditions for it were being finalised.
He, however, said MCP would hand over all sweepers to the company before making it responsible for removal of garbage from and clean the streets and roads, and in return, the corporation would pay a specific amount of money to the company every month.When asked the relevant officials are silent over poor sanitation services in the city, the official said the sanitation staff bribed their immediate bosses to shirk assigned tasks.
“Actually, the relevant officers have share in the salaries of the sanitation staff,” he said.
When contacted, MCP administrator Atifur Rehman said work was underway to pre-qualify companies for outsourcing sanitation work in the city.
He said first sanitation staff shirked duty, second the corporation was short of garbage disposal machinery and third most of the available machinery, including garbage containers, multi-loaders and tractors, were in bad shape.
“We need 20 multi-loaders in working condition but have five to six only,” he said.
The MCP administrator said the corporation had no excavators and therefore, it had to rent excavators from the market to clean drains.
He said the city’s all sanitation staff and machinery would be handed over to the company to be contracted to carry out sanitation work.
“In return, they (the company) will give us a clean city,” he said.
Mr Rehman said around 50 MCP sanitation workers had been given the sack and more than 200 suspended in two months.
However, some MCP officials said sacking and suspending shirking members of the sanitation staff won’t work as cleaning the capital city was beyond their capacity. They said only a company equipped with modern machinery and strict administration could ensure a clean Peshawar.
