Waste management: New set up to restore ‘clean and beautiful’ city

LWMC takes over SWM staff and equipment, raises wages.

LAHORE:

The City District Government of Lahore (CDGL) signed over responsibility for keeping the streets clean to the Lahore Waste Management Company (LWMC) on Saturday. The managing director of the company said they would soon implement two plans to make the city “beautiful and clean”.

Under an agreement signed at the Town Hall by District Coordination Officer (DCO) Ahad Khan Cheema and LWMC managing director Dr Waseem Ajmal, all assets, staff and machinery of the city government’s Solid Waste Management department has been transferred to the LWMC for a lease of 20 years. The pay of daily wagers has been raised by Rs25-40 per day.

The LWMC will now be responsible for “managing, controlling and monitoring of existing procedures, processes, actions, activities, facilities, operations, schemes, plans, programmes and assets of the CDGL directly or indirectly related to generation, collection, separation, storage, rescue, recycling, transportation, transfer, reduction, treatment and disposal of solid waste.”

The city government, however, will still look after “pensions, gratuity, medical charges, prosecution of offenders, handling and defending court cases regarding SWM, carrying out disciplinary proceedings of employees [and] matters arising out of environmental liabilities.” The SWM District Office will monitor “agreed key performance indicators”.

The LWMC had already been responsible for waste management in six of the city’s 150 union councils. It will get Rs2.5 billion annually from the Punjab government to perform its operations.

Lahore Commissioner Nadeem Hassan Asif said that the SWM department had failed because of “organisational incapability”. “We tried to rehabilitate the SWM department with new techniques but didn’t get the desired results,” he said.

Asif said no employees, permanent or work-charge, would be laid off. The company had increased the daily wages of unskilled workers from Rs275 to Rs300, semi-skilled workers from Rs290 to Rs320 and of skilled workers from Rs450 to Rs490, he said.

Ajmal, the LWMC managing director, said that 40 professionals including environmentalists and engineers had worked for them since last year and now that the company was finally operational, they would be deployed in the field “to make Lahore a beautiful and clean city”. The SWM employed 10,000 people of whom just two had passed intermediate and one was an engineer, he said.

He said that the company had drawn up two plans for Lahore. “One will be implemented soon and the other within a couple of months in collaboration with different companies.

The citizens will clearly see the difference in the coming days,” he said.

The LWMC signed an agreement with Turkish company ISTAC in December 2010 to act as operational and technical consultants on good practices in waste management. Experts from the company reviewed the LWMC’s systems in Lahore in January.





Published in The Express Tribune, June 26^th, 2011.