A smaller district of Punjab got 3 star rating in Centre’s garbage-free rating; got National attention
Kanwar Inder Singh/ royalpatiala.in/ Chandigarh
Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar or popularly known as Nawansahar added feather in Punjab’s cap, as it won the 3 star rating in Centre’s garbage-free rating campaign. It’s the only district of Punjab, HP, J&K, that won the star rating under cities, Urban Local Bodies (ULB’s) category. Maharashtra dominated the cleanliness drive and most of the cities, ULB’s that won the star rating are from Maharashtra.
When contacted Vinay Bublani, IAS deputy commissioner Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar (Nawansahar) gave all the credits to SBS Nagar residents. He said “without their contribution, this won’t be possible”. Bublani who also remained Municipal Corporation Commissioner, said” municipal council employees also played a vital role in the whole process. From time to time they keep on awaring the residents about the garbage disposal, garbage segregation, cleanliness etc. They also keep their processing units in operational mode, updating it from time to time, which helped them in getting this star rating at national level”.
He further added that “the administration helps the safai sewaks, support them from time to time. We redress their grievances, honour them for all the good work they did, keep their morale high as they are our frontline warriors”
Hardeep Singh Puri, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Housing and Urban Affairs, has informed that for the assessment year 2019-2020, a total of six cities have been certified as 5-Star , 65 cities as 3-Star and 70 cities as 1-Star. The Star Rating Protocol was launched by the Ministry in January 2018 to institutionalize a mechanism for cities to achieve Garbage Free status, and to motivate cities to achieve higher degrees of cleanliness.
Durga Shanker Mishra, Secretary, MoHUA who added, “To ensure that the Protocol has a SMART framework, we developed a three-stage assessment process. In the first stage, ULBs populate their progress data on the portal along with supporting documents within a particular timeframe. The second stage involves a desktop assessment by a third-party agency selected and appointed by MoHUA. Claims of cities that clear the desktop assessment are then verified through independent field level observations. In the recent phase of Star Rating Assessment, 1435 cities applied. During the assessments, 1.19 crore citizen feedbacks and over 10 lakh geo-tagged pictures were collected and 5175 solid waste processing plants were visited by 1210 field assessors. While 698 cities cleared the desktop assessment, 141 cities have been certified with Star Rating during field assessment. The low number of certifications signifies the rigorous and robust certification mechanism of the protocol”.
May,20,2020
