SHUBHANGI SHIFA
Ranchi, March 16: The Ranchi Municipal Corporation owes the Jaipur-based company CDC Rs 10 crore at the moment. The RMC had earlier outsourced the civic maintenance work, after which the CDC has been engaged in door-to-door garbage collection in the state capital.
Company officials say that due to held up payment from the municipal corporation, it is unable to pay salaries to its sanitation workers on time. As a result of which, the cleanliness system gets affected.
While talking of the issue, CDC project head Anuj Kumar said, “A total of Rs 10 crore remains as outstanding payments to the CDC by the RMC. The payment has been withheld for the past year, while we have been arranging payments for the employees to maintain the civic maintenance in the city.”
He further added, “We are hopeful that the payment will be done after Holi. Notably, the payment had been held due to some backlog related to scanning and other data, which had some discrepancies including certain clauses.”
“However, we have been providing coverage from day one, however, we need to submit online reports and other hard evidence of the work. The RMC knows that we are working but some paper work was needed. Though now I believe everything will be on track regarding backlog payments from April,” Kumar explained.
When enquired about the backlog payments, Kumar said, “I had received a service fee in advance for a total amount of Rs 48 lakhs in March 2021. Since then, we have not received any kind of payment. We arrange payments, but we have also had issues like delays. However, the workers have mostly been understanding towards us.”
It is worth noting that the Municipal Corporation has also given about 150 small garbage collection vehicles to the CDC company. Apart from this, sanitation workers are also engaged. But, often the sanitation system gets affected due to the strike of the sanitation workers. The drivers engaged in garbage collection have gone on strike several times in the past year, while the residents have also suffered due to this.
The company had tried to lift the garbage from houses by hiring some tractors. However, due to non-collection of garbage from all the houses, the sanitation system has repeatedly been crippled.
Meanwhile, the RMC last week appealed to the city residents to not make any kind of payment if the garbage was not picked up. Deputy Mayor Sanjeev Vijayvargiya had said that the building owners should pay the user charges fixed by the government to the company.
This decision was made due to the large number of complaints made by the residents to RMC. There have also been complaints that the employees of CDC are pressurizing people to pay user charges. Upon protests, the residents are being threatened to pay user charges along with fines.
The Deputy Mayor has asked such people to oppose the employees of the company because the company may be engaged in collecting user charges from thousands of homes without lifting the garbage.
RMC officials could not be contacted for a comment.
