THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Now the municipalities and corporations of the state will undergo a seven-star rating system on the basis of their waste-management practices. Setting the wheels in motion, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (MHUPA) along with the Suchitwa Mission has conducted a one-day workshop at the capital city on Tuesday.
An initiative of the MHUPA, the rating programme aims to make the cities garbage free ones and thereby ensure their cleanliness. According to Suchitwa Mission, the workshop is to make the local body heads, secretaries as well as standing committee heads to get acquainted with the system and it was attended by around 220 representatives.
“Based on 12 parameters, the urban local bodies will be rated as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 star based on their compliance with the protocol conditions specified for each of the ratings. MHUPA is of the view that with such a system in place the urban local bodies will focus more on ensuring the goals of cleanliness and solid waste management,” said R Ajayakumar Varma, executive director, Suchitwa Mission.
It is learned that while the local bodies could self-declare themselves as 1-star, 2-star or 4-star, in the case of declaration as 3-star, 5-star or 7-star, the ministry will carry out an additional verification through an independent third party before granting the rating being claimed. “The Star Rating Protocol of Garbage- Free Cities is designed on a SMART (Single metric, Measurable, Achievable, Rigorous verification and Targeted towards outcomes) approach, a first-of-its-kind rating tool for assessing the cleanliness of cities and towns in India. The stipulation is such that cities will need to get recertified themselves every year to retain their star-status,” said an officer with the Suchitwa Mission.
Meanwhile, Shaji Clement, Programme Officer, Suchitwa Mission said one of the distinctive features of the newly-introduced rating system is that while many cities can have higher stars in the newly introduced rating system, only one city could claim the ‘cleanest city’ tag under the Swachh Survekshan programme.
It was in January that the MHUPA introduced the idea of star rating protocol for rating cities on multiple cleanliness indicators for solid waste management, including door-to-door collection, bulk generator compliance, source segregation, sweeping, scientific processing of waste, scientific landfilling, construction and demolition management, citizen grievance redressal system and others. According to Suchitwa Mission, the regional workshop being held at Thiruvananthapuram is the fourth such meeting as MHUPA had planned 17 such workshops in different states by June 2018.