FAISALABAD, Feb 22: The Solid Waste Management system in nine major cities of Punjab is being run by non-technical officers who will eventually be replaced by qualified professionals, it is learnt.

The shortcomings of officials concerned have been revealed in studies being carried out by two foreign consultant companies hired by the Punjab government to assess the weaknesses in the system. The interim report has recently been handed over to the provincial government authorities who have dispatched the copies to the district nazims.

The provincial government with the collaboration of the World Bank is conducting two studies through a Korean and a Swiss company for nine cities — Faisalabad, Lahore, Gujranwala, Multan, Rawalpindi, Sargodha, Dera Ghazi Khan, Sialkot and Bahawalpur. The studies cover different sectors, including technical, financial, environmental, social, legal and regulatory framework and development of an integrated system of the SWM in selected cities.

Sources in the district government told Dawn that the interim reports of consultants clearly mentioned that these nine cities had been facing acute shortage of qualified human resource to implement the modern waste management systems.

“In most of the cities, the SWM is looked after by non-technical staff such as doctors or chief officers from general administration cadre. Lack of qualified and trained professionals are the key reasons for the poor working of this sector,” they quoted the report as identifying.

The consultants recommended that competent SWM professionals in city district governments and tehsil municipal administrations were required to run the sector. Professionals from civil, mechanical, chemical and environmental engineering backgrounds were required for sustainable SWM in the province, they stressed, adding that this practice was being observed all over the world.

The provincial government, sources said, had decided to employ the professionals and a strategy had been devised to implement the SWM service improvement plan which envisaged training of the existing manpower by a team of Korean experts from the Korea Environment Institute.

Meanwhile, the government’s urban unit had decided that qualified professionals would be recruited from the market through a competitive process. The selected officers would be trained locally and then sent to Korea for training. After completion of training, the professionals would be posted in the nine cities (two officers for each CDG and one for each TMA).