FOR the first time, it seems, serious and sustained efforts are being made by the provincial government of Sindh to face the otherwise difficult challenge of cleaning mountains of rubbish and garbage across Karachi.
The Sindh Solid Waste Management Board or SSWMB has started the door-to-door garbage collection service in all 31 Union Councils of the East District.
Karachi Administrator Murtaza Wahab has also announced that apart from garbage lifting, garbage dumping points would be eliminated to ensure cleanliness on a sustainable basis.
Karachi was once called the city of lights and its roads used to be washed at midnight daily but with the passage of time the situation was allowed to deteriorate and as a result there are piles of garbage and overflowing gutters everywhere.
Attempts were made in the past to reverse the situation even with the involvement of Pakistan Army and Bahria Town but no worthwhile improvement was made.
One must give credit to the provincial government for chalking out a workable strategy for lifting and elimination of garbage from the city.
In an ideal situation, either civic bodies or local contractors should have undertaken the job but given the tendency of shirk work, now foreign companies are being assigned the task and they are delivering the desired results.
In Punjab, a Turkish company was awarded a contract for cleaning of major cities and towns and it changed the landscape of these cities but unfortunately its contract was terminated under questionable circumstances in Lahore and as a result the city is facing unhygienic conditions.
The Sindh Government has done well by associating a Chinese company Changyi Kangjie for the task of garbage collection, which has deployed about two hundred rickshaws for door-to-door collection of the garbage from district East, obviating the need to dump it at so-called kutchra kundis.
It is also appreciable that the garbage backlog has been removed from the districts where the Waste Management Board is working.
As the new arrangement is producing good results, we would propose that the provincial government should extend the fullest possible cooperation (including provision of necessary funds) to replicate it across the city.
