NEW DELHI: Chief Minister Rekha Gupta on Saturday inaugurated a Fixed Compactor Transfer Station (FCTS) in Sarita Vihar’s M Block and flagged off vehicles for door-to-door waste collection. Thirty-five women drivers have been appointed to operate the vehicles. She also launched an initiative to deploy 1,000 mechanical litter pickers across all 250 Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) wards. In the first phase, 50 machines were flagged off to collect litter from roads and public places.
Gupta said sanitation and waste management were among Delhi’s biggest challenges and had been accorded top priority. Earlier, only 6,000-7,000 metric tonnes of the nearly 15,000 metric tonnes of waste generated daily could be processed, leading to the growth of landfill mounds.
To address the problem, the government is setting up new waste-to-energy plants, expanding existing facilities, establishing e-waste centres and installing biogas plants to manage cow dung. It is also providing sanitation machinery, improving infrastructure and increasing staff availability. For the South-East Zone, approval has been granted for 428 auto-tippers, 128 e-rickshaws, 25 Tata 407 vehicles, 27 refuse compactors, five additional compactors and 30 hook loaders. The zone also has 100 compactor bins. Additionally, 1,500 steel dustbins, 300 HDPE dustbins and 10 tipper trucks for horticultural waste have been provided.
The government is also supplying 1,000 battery-operated picker machines to the MCD.