Hyderabad considers service fee for solid waste disposal

Official says private contractor to be fined if failed to clear Hyderabad of waste within six months

HYDERABAD:

The Sindh Solid Waste Management Board’s executive director Nisar Ahmed Soomro has hinted at collecting a service fee in Hyderabad if the board and its contractor, Altas Pak company, won the trust of citizens through their service.

“We will first try to satisfy the business community and the public and then some reasonable fee will be fixed [for solid waste disposal],” he disclosed while addressing businessmen at the Hyderabad Chamber of Small Trade and Small Industry (HCSTSI) on Tuesday.

He assured the business community that the board would impose a fine on Altas Pak if it failed to deliver in Hyderabad. The company has been given a deadline of six months to get rid of the menace of solid waste.

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The company started working in Hyderabad less than four weeks ago with parts of Latifabad taluka selected for its early operations. Soomro said that over the next two months the door-to-door garbage collection would get underway with one to three visits per day.

“We have to clean Hyderabad's entire garbage heaps in the first six months of the company’s operations,” he said while adding that a 100-acre landfill site has been acquired along M9 Motorway which connects Karachi with Hyderabad.

He claimed that during the recent monsoon rains the SSWMB helped Hyderabad Municipal Corporation and Qasimabad Municipal Committee in the disposal of solid waste though the private contractor had then not started operations.

Comparing nullahs of Karachi with Hyderabad, he observed that much work had been done to clean them in Karachi, unlike Hyderabad where still encroachment existed on the drains.

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Likewise, he pointed out that the industrial zone of Hyderabad was also littered with garbage unlike the SITE area of Karachi.

He asked the industrialists to cooperate with the board if they wanted to keep their zone clean. He suggested the businessmen to give him names of four persons to maintain liaison between his department and the community.

The chamber's president Muhammad Farooq Shaikhani welcomed the role of the private sector in solid waste disposal. He suggested that local businessmen should be allowed to gradually replace the foreign companies which are working under a contract of the board. He lamented that the lack of solid waste recycling has caused heavy financial losses to the country.