LAHORE, April 6: After failure of its attempt to devolve sanitation to the union council level, the City District Government has now decided to privatize the solid waste collection on union council basis.

The CDG Solid Waste Management has decided to use the shoulder of the Union Council Nazims for the implementation of the plan to privatize the solid waste collection.

It has asked the UC Nazims to only give a formal consent for the purpose and leave the rest to it.

Nazims of union council Nos 96, 97, 98, 105 and 108 comprising Gulberg, Garhi Shahu, Zaman Park and Upper Mall areas have already given their consent for the implementation of the plan. The SWM has invited the private sector to come forward for procuring the contracts.

The contractors will be required to collect the solid waste from the doorstep of the citizens, industrial and commercial units and dump it in the SWM skips after removing their desired recyclable materials without littering it around the same.

The SWM will not pay the contractors but would authorize the contractors to collect the sanitation fee from the residents, industrial and commercial enterprises in exchange for their service.

Sanitation fee will be charged at the rate of Rs10, Rs20 and Rs30 per month for residential units measuring up to 5 marla, 10 marla and one kanal and above, respectively.

Shop owners and factory owners will pay the fee at the rate of Rs50 and Rs100 per month.

Sanitation is the responsibility of the towns under the Punjab Local Government Ordinance 2002. The City District Government got a resolution for devolution of the sanitation to the union council adopted from the Lahore District Council during its budget session last year.

The plan, however, could not be implemented because of the strong opposition of the sanitary workers’ unions and the reluctance of most union council Nazims to accept the responsibilities for solid waste and sanitation fee collection and payment of salaries to sanitary workers.

The CDG tried to privatize the solid waste collection on locality basis prior to the attempt to devolve it to the union council level.

Contracts were also awarded for solid waste collection from certain localities but the experiment failed owing to the refusal of the general public to pay the sanitation fee.

People oppose payment of sanitation fee because the defunct metropolitan corporation of Lahore used to justify the recovery of the property tax for covering the costs of its services, mainly the sanitation.

Majority of the people are also critical of the unsatisfactory sanitation services.

The CDG is going ahead with the recovery of the sanitation fee despite public criticism. It is spending Rs700 million on sanitation every year on the average and has been able to recover a maximum of Rs15 million per annum so far.

It is going ahead with the fee recovery plan because its financial experts believe that over Rs138.76 million can be collected annually in the form of fee from 445,340 residential, industrial and commercial units in the provincial metropolis.